This Week In Daily: June 5, 2015


Written By

Updated on

Madison Square Garden DraftKings

“This Week In Daily” is LegalSportsReport’s weekly wrap of key facts, happenings and miscellany from the daily fantasy sports industry.

Stories of note

DraftKings takes New York

DraftKings scored a pair of New York sponsorship packages this past week, the biggest being a deal with Madison Square Garden. That gives the DFS site partnerships with the New York Rangers and New York Knicks, as well as the New York Liberty (including a spot on their jerseys). The Knicks deal displaces FanDuel, which had sponsored the team.

And there’s this:

DraftKings will become the title partner of the “DraftKings Fantasy Lounge” on Madison Square Garden’s SAP Madison Concourse that will provide a dynamic experience to the millions of fans attending sports and entertainment events at The Garden each year. The space, which will open this fall, will include prominent DraftKings branding and give attendees at Garden events an interactive place to gather and play DraftKings daily fantasy sports.

DK also inked a deal with the Belmont Stakes, giving it a presence as American Pharaoh goes after the Triple Crown. Details here, along with a look at the big two signing event sponsorships.

Keep track of the landscape with our sponsorship tracker.

SportsLock Gets $5mm

Not long after ScoreStreak suspended operations, saying they needed $5 million in funding, another site got that amount.

SportsLock received a $5mm round of funding, and already has its eye on more, according to a recent report at Forbes. At this DFS site, the social aspect is played up. Fantasy entrants draft their players in real-time, and contests aren’t just one-offs: There are brackets that you have to advance through to win.

Many thought the ScoreStreak shutdown might be a harbinger of the end of the golden days of investment funding for DFS — at least outside of the big two. But this investment might signal otherwise.

Of the week

Read of the week

“These 10 Words Could Signal The Future Of Daily Fantasy Sports”

Interesting take from LSR publisher Chris Grove, who focuses on this recent quote from FanDuel CEO Nigel Eccles:

It’s not about the playoffs or the Super Bowl. We’re driving people to watch the day-to-day, regular in-season games. We’re driving attention when fan interest is at its lowest.

It’s the latest example that the endgame for DFS down the road might be ownership of the sites by the leagues themselves.

Tweet of the week

Watch of the Week

In a shameless bit of self-promotion, I appeared on the first-ever “State of DFS” podcast at Rotocurve:

Number of the week

$221 million

After the SportsLock investment round, this is the total amount of known investments made into DFS sites.

Photo by Richiekim used under license CC BY-SA 3.0.