🔎 A Look Into the NHL’s New $100,000 “Chamber”

Fellow sports content creator, Jack Settleman, recently posted his 5 BOLD predictions for the industry in 2026, where he answered a question about prediction markets:

“I love products that help tell stories and in a perfect world, PMs are one of those products. Imagine after last night’s game 💔 if Tirico and Collinsworth had shown a PM graph. Because they’re markets, they should be a better representation of truth than odds.”

I’ll reserve my own opinion on prediction markets for the end of this newsletter, but I’m curious about your thoughts on the rise of sites like Kalshi and Polymarket.

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: How the Bears Reduced Crime in Chicago (Seriously)

📉 Biggest Loser: Why Do Sports Fans Keep Falling for This?

🏆 Winner’s Circle: A Look Into the NHL’s New $100,000 “Chamber”

🗞 The Big Story

The Chicago Bears just set a record that I don’t think will ever be broken, but it actually has nothing to do with football. Let’s break it down.

Chicago Crime Down: The mayor of Chicago recently announced that 2025 was the city’s safest year since the mid-1960s, with double-digit decreases in every major crime category:

• Overall Violent Crime: -21.3% 

• Homicides: -29.0% 

• Shootings: -34.5% 

• Multi-Victim Shootings: -35.6% 

• Robberies: -36.1% 

• Vehicular Hijackings: -50.0% 

• Human Trafficking: -31.3% 

This led many Bears’ fans to correlate this reduction in crime with the team’s best season in almost 10 years.

But is that actually true?

Well, luckily, we can answer that exact question thanks to a 2014 study out of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, which analyzed by-the-minute crime reports in Chicago during Bears’ games to see if there were any significant reductions in crime depending on how the team was playing, and the results honestly shocked me.

Study Results: This study first looked at the overall effect a televised Bears’ game has on crime in the city, and what they found was that just by playing a game, the team is responsible for about a 15% reduction in crime, which equates to about 30-45 fewer crimes per day.

But then they looked at how the result of a game affects crime rates, and what they discovered was that if the team loses, crime remains the same, but if the team wins, there’s a 17% drop in total crime.

This is because of a phenomenon that the study describes as “voluntary incapacitation,” which basically means that, since most crimes are opportunistic, the fact that potential offenders are more likely to be at home watching games when the team is good, the probability of them going out and committing a crime is drastically reduced.

You can read the full study here.

📉 Biggest Loser

Why do we all keep falling for this?

Because after the Kansas City Chiefs announced that they’d be leaving Arrowhead Stadium after 53 years and moving across state lines into Kansas, all I saw fans arguing about was the new stadium’s design, even though the thing we should be talking about is how bad this deal is for every single football fan in America.

Chiefs' New Stadium: Now, it’s no secret that billionaire owners love using taxpayer dollars to build their stadiums. But by making Kansas and Missouri effectively bid against each other, the Chiefs just secured $1.8 billion of public money to build their new $3 billion dome.

Not only is this the most public money ever given to a professional sports team for a new stadium, but the state also agreed to contribute up to $975 million to support a new mixed-use development around the stadium that they won’t even own.

Still, that’s not even close to the worst part.

Stadium Revenue: Because, while the state does technically own this new stadium, as Joe Pompliano points out in his review of this deal, the Chiefs get to keep 100% of all stadium revenue, including ticket sales, concessions, and sponsorships, which amounts to nearly $300 million per year.

While Pompliano notes that the team will have to pay $7 million per year in rent, that money won’t actually go towards paying the stadium off; instead, it’ll go directly into a fund that the Chiefs will control to pay for things like:

• Renovations

• Repairs

• Game day expenses

For context, this deal in Kansas comes after 58% of Missouri voters rejected a sales tax increase that would have helped pay for multi-billion-dollar upgrades to both Arrowhead and Kauffman Stadium.

But unfortunately for football fans across the country, this also sets the precedent that unless you’re willing to pay for your favorite team’s stadium, they could also end up moving cities (or even states).

🏆 Winner’s Circle

This $100,000 pod claims to give the Florida Panthers an advantage that no other NHL team has, but what the hell does it actually do?

Hyperbaric Chambers: This is the Mediterranean Chamber, made by a Turkish company called Hypotech. This 4-seat hyperbaric chamber is apparently the newest addition to the Panthers’ in-season performance and recovery program.

If you’ve heard of hyperbaric chambers before, it was probably in the context of scuba diving, since divers who resurface too fast use them to reduce the risk of getting decompression sickness or “the bends,” which is when harmful nitrogen bubbles form in the bloodstream.

But what does any of this have to do with hockey?

Sports Science: Well, the main purpose of a hyperbaric chamber is to force oxygen into the body. Inside this pod, athletes breathe 100% pure oxygen, which is essentially “pushed” into the bloodstream because the internal air pressure is 2-3x higher than normal. This creates an environment where oxygen can more easily reach a player’s plasma, which signals their cells to:

• Repair damaged tissue

• Build new blood vessels

• Reduce inflammation more quickly than normal

Hockey Protocol: Now, while we don’t know the exact details of how the Panthers use their custom-built chamber, it’s likely that most players sit in it 1-2 days per week for 60-90 minutes to more quickly recover from routine soreness and travel fatigue.

However, it’s possible that a player recovering from a more serious injury could be sitting in this thing 3 or more times per week. Luckily, each seat comes with its own touch screen entertainment system, so players can watch film or even a movie while they recover.

Even though the price for this specific unit isn’t publicly available, similarly sized hyperbaric chambers tend to cost at least $100,000 each.

⏱️ In Other News

• Here’s 60 seconds of Eddie Lacy highlights

• The Savannah Bananas lost $6 million because of an email

• The “Las Vegas Athletics” have been… denied?

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👋🏻 Happy Friday!

Full transparency, I worked with Kalshi twice at the beginning of 2025:

• March Madness

• The Masters

However, I also turned down a deal with Polymarket late last year because of my uncertainty around the product.

I’m curious about your POV on prediction markets:

(I’d vote for “mixed”)