The Sport Market Podium, funded by Alpine Credits: April 4

0:00Now, with the top three sports business stories of the week, here's the sport market podium funded by Alpine Credits, own your home and need a loan, homeowners get approved. Apply now at Alpinecredits.ca. For background on the stories, go to the sport market, top is. In the bronze medal position, it is the WNBA expansion draft. The seventh expansion draft in the 30-year history of a league that was founded in 1996. The Toronto tempo, of course, would have loved to have the first pick, Bridget Carlton of the Minnesota links, the Canadian, but Portland had the first pick and they went with Bridget Carlton in a night in which Toronto tempo went with Julie Alamand of the LA Sparks. Those are the first players of each of these two expansion franchises.

1:02Welcome to the WNBA expansion draft. With the first pick in this year's WNBA expansion draft, the Portland fire, they have selected Bridget Carlton here from the Minnesota links, remember the 28-year-old, she started every game for the links last season and she has a career 39% free point shooter. She's going to be bringing that sharp shooting to Portland, something that City is really accustomed to. Into the tempo with the second pick and they selected Julie Alamand from the Los Angeles Sparks. She is one of 12 qualified players to average five assists last season. The 29-year old is headed to Toronto. Now they don't get Bridget Carlton, the tempo doesn't get Bridget Carlton, but they make a statement with the number of international players that they drafted in this expansion draft, including Julie Alamand. Ironically, her name means German and it was a testament to some of the European players and other international that will be part of the WNBA Toronto

2:07launch. Julie Alamand from the LA Sparks making headlines there. In the silver metal position, our number two sport business story of the week, Nike going anything but swoosh. What is going wrong for Nike? I mean, the problem here is the pace of change and you're really seeing investors disappointed in how fast the turnaround is happening. So there are really two persistent sore points here that we saw from yesterday's results. So the first being converse, the iconic brand, sales are down 30%. For a long time, the company has relied on sales of its iconic Chuck Taylor sneakers, but unfortunately, you know, consumers are just not as interested in the sneakers they were before. The other sore point is greater China sales. So that's down 17%. And that's because Nike has really struggled to sell off a lot of its excess old inventory and really innovate fast enough to capture the attention of an increasingly picky Chinese consumer. That analysis courtesy of Bloomberg news on a week in which Nike

3:10literally collapsed in terms of its share value. This is an 11 year low for Nike that they felt earlier this week. They have seen the frittering away of $200 billion of market cap since 2021. And the turnaround plan, as mentioned there by Bloomberg, is getting a lot of the blame for the market collapse simply because of that question as to where is Nike going to go and how come the pace of change in the turnaround has been so slow. You're talking about them being at $180 a share now 4470 a share. Now Nike is resilient in my view. It does have a global brand. It does have a tradition of bouncing back, but it's rarely been in this kind of a market exposure

4:11situation. And that's why it's silver on the sport market podium funded by Alpine credits. But the number one sport business story of the week, it is the new baseball season, early returns, the return of NBC to Major League Baseball, and also the debut of Netflix on the season opening week. It's easy to criticize Netflix for trying too hard and they did try too hard last night. But when you have bells and whistles, you want to showcase that. You want to wow the audience. It was just too much Netflix. It was as if I was tuning into a kind of a power point on Netflix that there was a baseball game inside of that. Like look at all the things that we do. And you're trying to go, I'm kind of here to watch the baseball game. Well Netflix wants to sell you on Netflix. That is basically the real nub here. Netflix has to self promote as Dan Patrick just

5:24said. Why would they make the investment without getting any return on it? But it's all a balancing act. It's all a finding that sweet spot kind of thing. They're going to sort that out. And Netflix has a tremendous opportunity combined with to do as quick sidebar here. The NFL Christmas day package where they're going to have two games on Netflix and then a third on a on a third carrier. That is driving a lot of new subscriptions for Netflix, which has basically been the omnipresent video content provider, not only North America, but in the world. And this baseball opportunity is just going to be another one that will bring them a couple of generations of market scope to the table. That is our gold medal story. And by the way, it's gold because Netflix did really make an impact

6:29on the dollar demo, the 18 to 34 is the 18 to 49's, 2.9 million tuning in for the blowout, seven nothing blowout, New York Yankees of the San Francisco Giants. That is a pretty impressive start and compares very favorably with the other broadcast NBC, their opening coverage, Fox, its opening coverage, all in the 2.5 million to 2.9 million Netflix at the top of the charts.