Are The 76ers A Pawn In StubHub’s Business War?

On Monday the 76ers became the first NBA team to sell ad space on their game uniforms.  The NBA in April opened the doors for a three year pilot program allowing teams to have sponsorship on jerseys.  Attorney Alicia Jessop, who is a contributing sports business writer for Forbes.com along with HuffingtonPost and CNBC, was a guest on The Sports Bash on Monday explained why this had less to do with the Sixers being an "innovative" NBA franchise and more to do with StubHub making a statement:

"I think there is a deeper issue here and I think that this is really a political power play by StubHub.  So when you look at the NBA, the NBA as a league has an exclusive deal with Ticketmaster.  The teams, outside of the NBA, can enter into their own ticketing deals.  And in the world of the NBA we have a couple different players in the world of ticketing.  One is Ticketmaster, Ticketmaster has deals with 24 teams.  Another one is a company that was actually started by the Cavs' Dan Gilbert (Veritix) his company has roughly 5 NBA teams.  And then StubHub has one NBA team and it's one NBA team is the Philadelphia 76ers.  So what I think this boils down to is StubHub trying to remain competitive in the NBA Marketplace and also kind of sending up a flare, if you will, to Ticketmaster and Dan Gilbert saying 'It's your turn to play".  Because, guess what, the 76ers might be the worst team, like you said, in Pro Sports in America but now (StubHub) little ad is going to be seen at least on 82 games during the NBA season on their jerseys.  So what are you going to do Ticketmaster?  Are you willing to spend 5 million bucks a pop?  Because if you aren't, (StubHub) is coming after your teams now and willing to shell out the money.  So I think this going to embroil into a pretty interesting battle over the summer for this ad space and essentially what StubHub did is it played the first card."

Hear what Jessop had to say about the future of advertising sponsorship in the NBA along with where American Professional Sports are heading in terms of business and advertising