I was listening to a podcast this week and a DraftKings ad came on and said something along the lines of “Now that the 82-game preseason is over, it’s time for the real NBA season to start.”

I can’t imagine Adam Silver would be too happy if he heard one of his betting sponsors discredit the entire NBA regular season as meaningless.

But then again, we were all thinking it...

🗞 The Big Story: The Unsellable NBA Team

📉 Biggest Loser: Nike’s Failed Colored Contacts

🏆 Winner’s Circle: Paige Bueckers’ Secret Soles

🗞 The Big Story

How did one NBA owner mess up his team so badly that nobody wanted to buy it?

Resulting in the league doing something it has never done before…

To Kill a Mockingbird Hornet: Throughout the 1990s, the Charlotte Hornets were an above-average franchise that only had a losing record in three of its ten seasons that decade.

But within the city, the team was hated which was a result of its owner, George Shinn, being accused of kidnapping and rape by a Charlotte woman.

A jury never found Shinn guilty, but he did admit to having two relationships outside of his marriage which further damaged his reputation as his trial was broadcast across America.

Not to mention that around the same time, Shinn was complaining about the team’s stadium (which was only about 10 years old). This caused him to apply for relocation to Memphis in 2001, which he lost to the Grizzlies.

He then told Charlotte he would only keep the team in the city if they built him a brand new arena at no cost to him. The city initially refused, which led Shinn to shop the team around again to Norfolk, Louisville, or St. Louis.

But when Charolette eventually agreed to put the new stadium proposal up for a vote, Shinn withdrew his plans for relocation.

But the vote didn’t pass, so Shinn picked up the Hornets one final time and requested that they move to New Orleans in 2002.

Bad Times in the Bayou: As for the Hornets’ first few years in New Orleans, they were an average team at best but between 2005-2007 they were forced to relocate to Oklahoma City because of Hurricane Katrina.

This temporary move, as well as disappointing play on the court, led to the New Orleans Hornets averaging fewer than 14,000 fans per game by 2009.

Not to mention, the team was losing millions of dollars per year, and this mounting debt proved to be too much for the team’s owner, George Shinn, who put the Hornets up for sale in 2010.

There was just one problem:

No one wanted to buy the struggling franchise (well, that’s not entirely true)…

NBA Steps In: You see, it later came out that billionaire and co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, placed a $350 million bid on the bankrupt team on one condition:

That he would get to move it closer to his home in San Jose.

However, realizing that the Hornets could theoretically be playing in their fourth city in just ten years, the league decided to step in and “outbid” Ellison to gain control over the franchise.

The only issue is that they didn’t actually outbid Ellison, since it was reported that the NBA paid just $300 million to assume control of the team.

For Shinn’s part in all of this, he managed to make almost $270 million after buying the franchise for just $32.5 million in 1987.

The league eventually sold the team to Tom Benson, owner of the New Orleans Saints, for $338 million in 2012 who promptly changed their name to the Pelicans.

Officially marking the first (and only) time the league has ever had to buy and run one of its franchises.

📉 Biggest Loser

Welcome back to another installment of “Sports Science Scams We All Definitely Fell For And Begged Our Parents To Buy For Us.”

Nike Maxsight: Remember those colored contact lenses that everyone from Bryce Harper to Santonio Holmes were wearing in the early 2010s?

Companies like Nike were making these things and claiming that they helped on-field performance, but after some digging, I found out why they were actually discontinued.

The Concept: Nike launched their MaxSight contact lenses in partnership with Bausch & Lomb in 2005.

These lenses claimed to:

• Replace sunglasses and reduce glare by filtering out ultraviolet light

• Increase athlete performance by making the ball “crisper” through patented technology

A doctor on the project even said “For a vast majority of individuals who wear this lens, it will give them the edge over someone of equal skill not wearing them.”

There was just one problem: These claims weren’t exactly true.

The Science: Nike made two colors of these lenses for two different kinds of sports.

Amber Lenses:

• Best for fast-moving ball sports like baseball and tennis

• Claimed to allow athletes to more easily pick up the spin of the ball by increasing color contrast

Gray-Green Lenses:

• Recommended for athletes who typically wear sunglasses

• Claimed to reduce glare and allow athletes to focus more on the landscape during sports like golf, running, and cycling

  • (Ex. golfers could more easily see the read of a putting green)

Nike even had a defacto spokesperson for Maxsight in Orioles second baseman, Brian Roberts.

Roberts partially credited the best season of his career in 2005 where he hit .321 and made his first All-Star game, with wearing Maxsight lenses during day games.

The Cost: Nike wasn’t the first (or the last) company to release color-tinted contact lenses but they did make the biggest splash, selling them to over 4,500 optometrists across the world for $60 per six-pack.

The lenses were meant to be worn for 30 days and then discarded, which meant a year’s supply would cost someone just $240.

But as athletes started getting their hands on these things, they realized that they didn’t really do what they had promised.

The Studies: Over the next few years, color-tinted contact lenses would be studied by multiple universities and doctors only to reveal that they had no meaningful effect on an athlete’s performance.

And in some cases, these studies even found that professional athletes performed worse when wearing color-tinted lenses.

And so, just three years after their release, Nike discontinued Maxsight in 2008, but not because the NFL banned them for some “unfair advantage.”

In fact, companies like Sports Tint continued to work with professional athletes into the 2010s, but today virtually all of these products were discontinued because they simply didn’t work.

Not to mention they’re scary as hell…

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🏆 Winner’s Circle

Paige Bueckers has been wearing a hidden sensor in her shoes that helps prevent her from getting injured…

And it might be the secret to tapping into the biggest new market in sports.

Secret Soles: Bueckers has dealt with several major knee injuries while playing at UConn, including a tearing her ACL in August of 2022.

And after finally being cleared to play again this season, she appeared better than ever.

But the entire time she was wearing custom insoles from a company called Plantiga, which feature embedded sensors to track data on an athlete’s:

• Ground forces

• Stride length

• Contact times

• Asymmetries

These sensors are then removed from the insoles after a game or practice and the data is uploaded and analyzed by AI to help break down:

• An athlete’s performance

• Determine when they should return to play after an injury

• Help to prevent future injuries

Dirty Data: When athletes of any gender tear their ACL, they have anywhere from an 8 to 40 times higher risk of tearing it again.

But for female athletes, specifically, this risk can be even higher simply because most of the studies done on athletic injuries have historically been done on men.

In fact, studies on males have gotten so good that Plantiga itself was able to estimate how long ago a male Canadian soldier injured his knee down to the month based on AI analysis of current data.

But when they tried to apply that same model to women, they couldn’t predict anything because all the data had been collected using males.

Indicating that there needs to be more data collected on women to accurately predict these same sorts of injuries.

Getting Better Data: This is why Plantiga has been working with the NCAA and soon, the WNBA, to collect data throughout a season specifically on female athletes.

The company not only worked with Bueckers but also with UConn’s Azzi Fudd and Jana El Alfy, all of whom had suffered ACL or Achilles injuries in the last 20 months.

The data collected on these three, as well as more women in the future, can train AI models to help companies like Plantiga better predict when injuries for female athletes might happen and how to better prevent them.

As of right now, Plantiga is just a company of 10 people with $5.5 million in investments but don’t be surprised if they start growing much faster as they lead the way in tracking the growing market of women’s sports.

📊 Chart of the Week

UFC pulled in $1.3 billion in revenue last year, less than every major American sport not named MLS ($1.1 billion in revenue in 2019).

But what they lack in revenue, they make up for in profit margin.

With no union, each fighter’s camp is left to negotiate their salary for each fight.

Fighters are paid bonuses for winning awards like “fight of the night” and “knockout of the night” on each card, and only championship fights see a small portion of the pay-per-view revenue.

For more interesting charts, check out my friends at SportsBall (this isn’t an ad, I genuinely love their work).

⏱ In Other News

• How Hollywood Brown is going to make millions by going on vacation.

• The (Surprising) History of Roger Goodell

• Should we combine the Men’s and Women’s Final Four?

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👋 I am happy to report that the high school baseball team I’m coaching is 1-0. Although, after this week we’ve had more rainouts than wins. We’re back in action today and tomorrow… I’m cautiously optimistic.

See you next week 🫡🔴 Nike's Failed Colored Contacts