The NBA is doing its best to put the “sports” into esports. For the past two months, the NBA has run the first video game league sponsored by a major sport, NBA 2K League, featuring 17 teams connected to franchises within the association. But sports simulation games, despite seeming like an obvious choice to go…
Spend an afternoon at a Top 8 Finals of any fighting game tournament, and you will find there is a robust side-betting culture in esports. Pseudo-gambling activities like “skin wagers” in Counter-Strike have been a part of esports culture from the beginning, and fringe sites like XLBet have included StarCraft games…
Tune in every weeknight to the University of Utah Esports Twitch stream and you can catch players from universities across the Pacific-12 conference competing in League of Legends, Hearthstone and Rocket League. It is the first league of its kind, an organization bringing together schools from a major conference for…
Turn your TV dial to the Yankees’ YES network next Wednesday, and instead of finding a documentary about Mickey Mantle or a replay of the 1998 World Series, you might end up watching a match of H1Z1 or League of Legends. It’s not just an offseason thing, either—the New York Yankees, baseball’s most storied franchise,…
A.J. Dimick sees big things in the future for collegiate esports. “I think college esports has a limitless ceiling, I really do,” Dimick told me over the phone earlier this year. To that end, Dimick, esports director at the University of Utah’s Entertainment Arts and Engineering department, has facilitated the…
As more and more money has flooded into the esports industry, player rights have been a hot topic across multiple games. Careers in esports can be extremely short, making it all the more important to ensure that players receive their fair share of the profits their work generates. With that in mind, Riot Games,…
The Milwaukee Bucks have—obvious exception aside—been a depressing team to watch this season. The defense that made them one of the surprise teams of 2014-15 has completely disappeared. The gamble on Michael Carter-Williams as the point guard of the future has been a disaster, as Carter-Williams has lost his grip on…
Last month, given the chance to affirm that college athletes have basic labor rights, the National Labor Review Board punted. It’s rare that a sports metaphor so perfectly crafted for lazy headline writers is so fitting, but punting—the most cowardly, spineless, and responsibility-evading decision routinely made in…
There will never be any question over what it means to have scored 25 points, or recorded a number of rebounds, blocks, or steals. Sure, if we've learned anything in the age of analytics it's that raw stats can be misleading—they fail to account for pace or efficiency—but at least they are facts. Russell Westbrook's…
