Bruce Dowbiggin
Destroying The Development System: Expect Turbulence

News Item: Child golf phenom Xavier Perez has scored a major NIL deal before even becoming a teenager. The 12-year-old, who has won more than 250 tournaments since he began playing golf competitively nine years ago, landed a name, image and likeness deal with Cobra Puma.
NIL, to the uninitiated, means Name Image Likeness. And it’s about to blow up the development models for a number of sports— including hockey. The right of athletes to profit from NIL is the result of decades of legal challenges by “student” athletes in the U.S. who saw coaches, programs and networks get phenomenally rich while they received only a scholarship in return (only one percent of all collegiate student-athletes receive a full ride.)
If an athlete was seen to be receiving even a meal or a job from an outside party they lost their “amateur” status and were ineligible for play in the U.S. college system that supplies talent to the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB. Ditto if they used an agent. For decades the system prevailed. Until the explosion in the digital world of video games, when greedy colleges reaped a fortune using the NIL of athletes— never thinking they’d need to compensate them.
The result was O’Bannon v NCAA, a challenge to U.S. antitrust law in which former UCLA star Ed O’Bannon and a number of other former NCAA athletes won the right in 2014 to be compensated for their NIL in the EA Sports series. That produced years of negotiations in which the NCAA tried to create a system that would preserve college athletics while staying within the terms of the decision.
On July 1, 2021, the NCAA announced it had agreed to rules that “removed restrictions on college athletes from entering paid endorsements and other sponsorship deals, and from using agents to manage their publicity”. The only caveat is that athletes can’t use the symbols, uniforms or logos of the school in their advertising. And universities can’t pay athletes directly.
What they created is a wide-open system that 12-year-old Xavier Perez is now exploiting. What does it mean? It means that the top prospects headed to the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB could now be making millions even as they play FBS bowl games, March Madness, the Frozen Four etc. They will be able to make decisions on what school to attend based on financial remuneration as well as opportunity to play. They’ll also be able to make significant money years before they enter college.
Because the remuneration comes from booster groups, outsider sponsors and equipment companies, schools will not have the ultimate control they’ve exercised for over a century. An athlete who has financial security will not be forced to go pro before he/ she is ready or go to a team they don’t want to play for. (Or he/ she can use the new transfer portals to switch schools as they see fit.)
“I definitely would’ve stayed for a fifth year [if there were NIL laws],” said Cardale Jones, a former star quarterback at Ohio State. “With my draft status, and still having a household name in college football in Columbus, [Ohio,] I’m pretty sure I would’ve made a lot more money than being drafted in the fourth round.”
NIL is not a panacea for all athletes. Even at the top schools opportunities will be limited for low-profile players in the non-glamour positions. There will conceivably be millionaire QBs playing with OL grunts who might have a deal with a sandwich shop. Smaller schools will have trouble competing with the big boys of Div One.
ESPN reported on what Georgia Tech players received for becoming social influencers. “Swanky PJs are part of what Yellow Jackets players received in exchange for agreeing to promote TiVo on social media this month. They also got a prepaid debit card worth $404 (Atlanta’s area code is 404) and the company’s 4k streaming device… the total value is more than $100,000, according to TiVo, who said 90 of the team’s players have signed a contract for the endorsement.”
The system is only now being implemented; dramatic changes will doubtless appear. Already there is tension among the coaches who must now deal with the new rules. Alabama’s football legend Nick Sabin and Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher recently got into a heated public bitch slapping over the ethics and inducements of recruiting. “That creates a situation where you can basically buy players,” said Saban, who makes about $10 million a year. “You can do it in recruiting. I mean, if that’s what we want college football to be, I don’t know.”
Prize recruit Bryce Young, who had yet to start a game for Saban at Alabama, had NIL deals closing in on $1 million. Clearly, football and basketball will need to streamline their development system. If colleges are now a pay-for-play system, how does that affect their status as institutions of learning? What happens if excesses in NIL force government into stripping colleges of the development role and giving it to pro leagues?
There has been zero information on how NIL affects the development system of NHL prospects? At the moment a majority of them go to Canada’s low-paying CHL teams which play far more games a season than does the NCAA. One game in CHL disqualified a prospect from playing in the NCAA’s formerly simon-pure amateur system.
But now a Connor McDavid can sign an NIL contract at 14 years old, play in the NCAA and— rich already— still be drafted No. 1 overall. Yes, college hockey has a lower profile and fewer opportunities for endorsements. Some will want the CHL’s experience. But a McDavid-type player would be a prize catch for an equipment company or a video game manufacturer. Or even as an influencer. All things currently not allowed in the CHL.
NIL won’t kill the CHL but it could strip away a significant portion of its stars who choose guaranteed money over long bus rides and billeting with other players. It’s early days, of course, but be prepared for an NHL No. 1 draft pick being a millionaire before his name is even called in the draft.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Bruce Dowbiggin
How Did PEI Become A Forward Branch Plant For Xi’s China?

scoopercooper DEA Busts Canadian Narco Whose Chinese Supplier Promised to Ship 100 Kilos of Fentanyl Precursors per Month From Vancouver to Los Angeles
https://x.com/scoopercooper/status/1945489327892365716
The Chinese Communist Party is flooding America with dirty pesticide marijuana disguised as THCa hemp flower and hemp-derived products sold in smoke shops.
Official Silence on Medical Waste From PRC-Linked Monasteries Must Be Broken .
We were talking very recently to a Toronto friend about the threat of drug trafficking—in particular fentanyl— to the U.S. as a threat to Canada’s sovereignty. This businessman, who does considerable international trade, shrugged and said it’s no big deal. He’d heard the Yanks had only caught 59 pounds at the border between 2022-2024. To his eye, things were under control.
This statistic was, of course, the Liberals’ standard talking point in the 2025 election— part of Mark Carney’s What, Me Worry? appeal about China to anxious Boomers. My friend still repeating this twaddle is a tribute to the staying power of the Liberal’s media stranglehold in the face of evidence that has been out there courtesy of reporters such Sam Cooper and Garry Clement since 2015.
As the above stories illustrate drug trafficking and money laundering are believed to be rampant in Carney’s Canada— with the Chinese in the forefront and immigrant students-turned-truckers hauling the narcotics across the border. The fentanyl version of El Chapo and other confederates live openly in the Toronto area. As the recent bust promising 100 kilos a month to L.A. makes clear, the 59-pound fentanyl deflection insults the work of those who have been labouring under dangerous conditions to highlight the Liberals’ lassitude on crime.
As we wrote when Justin Trudeau was still swanning around as PM: “The sitting Canadian prime minister, who praised the Chinese form of governing before he reached the PM post, has been seen in photos with underground Asian gang figures. As were previous Liberal leaders like Jean Chretien who made no secret of his lust for the Chinese market. Chinese money was used to build extensively in Chretien’s Shawinigan riding.
Donations to Trudeau from all across Canada constituted up to 80 percent of the riding’s contributions that year. In May 2016, one such fundraiser saw Trudeau hosted by Benson Wong, chair of the Chinese Business Chamber of Commerce, along with 32 other wealthy guests in a pay-for-access event. The patterns exposed by Cooper finally prompted a commission by Quebec justice Marie-Josée Hogue looking into Chinese interference in Trudeau’s successful 2019 and 2021 elections.
Hogue later reported that Chinese interference in those elections did undermine the rights of Canadian voters because it “tainted the process” and eroded public trust. So petrified was Trudeau of the full Hogue Report that he prorogued parliament for three months and handed in his resignation rather than test his 22 percent approval rating in a Canadian election.”
What the rest of the world knows— but Canadian officials refused to tell their citizens during the federal election campaign— is that Canada has been corrupted by openly approving of China’s method of controlling their citizens worldwide and placing operatives within Canada’s government.

The story of how Liberal candidate Paul Chiang told a Chinese-language media news conference that people could cash in if they turned in Conservative Joe Tay in to the Chinese consulate in Toronto is illustrative. At first Carney called it a “lapse in judgment”, but then he let Chiang continue as a candidate. After pushback, Peter Yuen, was appointed the Liberal party’s nominee in the Toronto-area riding. Yuen has ties to Chinese agencies that seek to control Chinese citizens in Canada. (He lost in the April vote.)
Equally concerning is how the CCP has turned peaceful PEI into a forward operating base. On a recent trip to PEI we were told by local sources about the Buddhist monasteries being allowed under the not-so-watchful eye of various layers of government and the paid-for Media Party. Using bags full of dirty cash, the Bliss & Wisdom Buddhists have bought up large tracts of PEI farmland and replaced it with a front for the CCP to launder dirty money and infiltrate its people into the community. (The Buddhists deny this.)
Meetings have drawn hundreds of concerned Islanders (but not, until recently, many politicians or media). The latest outrage was the discovery of medical waste left behind on a rural property. It is alleged that it stems from a tuberculosis outbreak among the monks, where still-infectious monks were quietly sent home to China on public airlines wearing masks. Fires that destroyed two buildings nearby are alleged to have been to protect against health officials finding evidence of TB on site.
Media attention from outside PEI is now pushing officials to investigate the attempt to plant “police” stations to monitor expatriate Chinese and affect elections. Former RCMP officer Garry Clement has done extensive research on this file with Michel Juneau-Katsuya and Dean Baxendale. For more detailed description on the infiltration and political manipulation read Canada Under Siege: How PEI Became A Forward Operating Base of the Chinese Communist Party.

These are dramatic times as its appears that Chairman Xi might be on his way out as the leader of China. Any changes in the regime are just rumours at the moment. But Xi has overseen this massive campaign to extend Chinese outreach globally. That it would include even tiny PEI is shocking. The hope there is that with the Chinese economy under strain a new ruling elite in Beijing might pull back on the worldwide network as an expensive gamble.

That the China cheering club in the Liberal party in involved is less surprising since the outreach by Trudeau’s father Pierre in the 1970s. But with tariff issues dominating the news it would do well for Canadians to sober up to how compromised they are by the Chinese. That— not Donald Trump— is their biggest challenge.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Bruce Dowbiggin
The Covid 19 Disaster: When Do We Get The Apologies?

Breaking: Drs. Bonnie Henry and Theresa Tam have been appointed to the Order of Canada in recognition of their role in the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
And so the game of covid liar’s poker has more winners. It’s like awarding the captain of the Titanic the Nobel Prize for his work on floatation. As we now know these two— and the other WHO finger puppets in Canada— made the Covid 19 episode worse, not better, with their prescription for panic, positives and punishment. Even as they knew the truth about the limits of the virus and the efficacy of vaccines they continued to spew fallacious PCR data on the extent of the sickness and who was at risk.
Put simply, to protect vulnerable seniors they said kids were also at great risk. Which was unconscionable.
In this they encouraged Justin Trudeau in his worst instincts, combining his father’s insouciant disregard for civil rights (sending in the police) with his mother’s mental stability. Propped up by Team Tam and its U.S. allies such as Anthony Fauci, this hysteria peaked with a sequestered PM crushing the Truckers Convoy’s vaccine protest with emergency measures and destruction of civil liberties.
Lest you wonder, this overreach was recognized at the time. Justice Maclean wrote at the trial of Convoy organizers, “Defendants & other persons remain at liberty to engage in a peaceful, lawful & safe protest”. On Feb. 16, he continued a no-honking order, again writing: “Defendants & other persons remain at liberty to engage in a peaceful, lawful & safe protest.”
The leaders of the Convoy, lynched by Canadian media’s phoney claims of right-wing American interference, are still fighting jail time on charges of nuisance. While violent criminals are routinely released on bail or absolved.
Justice Richard Mosley later concluded that while the convoy was a disruption of public order, it didn’t constitute a national emergency and invoking the act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility.” But in real time Team Tam made no attempts to correct the wilder misgivings about Covid (lockdowns, mandatory vaccines). Trudeau was given a hall pass. Needless to say the purchased media made things infinitely worse regurgitating these mistakes.
In short, they knew better but hid the truth. But why pick on Henry and Tam? Under Trudeau and his wingman Jagmeet Singh this was the golden age of lies and prevarications in Canada and the U.S. No apologies were ever offered when the truth emerged.
As we’ve noted before, Trudeau cried with a teddy bear carefully positioned over 751 alleged unmarked graves in a known Catholic cemetery that the local Cowessess band abandoned. The Liberal government knew the claim of 215 “children’s graves” was false, and still ran with it to get Trudeau his photo-op. Naturally the CBC Media Party played (and still plays) accomplice in this farce as the Canadian flag was lowered to half-mast for six months and Trudeau ratted out Canada at the UN as a genocidal state.
There were more, plenty more Trudeau scandals that media endorsed and then stood by even as the truth was revealed. SNC Lavalin. We Charity. Arrive Can app. Firing indigenous justice minister. Chinese drug infiltration/ money laundering. Nazi Celebrated in Parliament. Welcome To Canada immigration. Nova Scotia massacre. McKinsey Consultation. Blackface. And so on.
And were there apologies when it came time to make the Trudeau Liberals accountable? No, they staged a media circus over Donald Trump’s assertion of 51st state. All the fake news and deliberate lies went poof, allowing Mark Carney to seamlessly assume the PM job.

Lest We Forget Pt. 2 it was not exclusive to Canada. As we are now learning: Barack Obama and Joe Biden sat in an August 3, 2016 Situation Room briefing and said, yeah, let the highest officials in our administration fabricate evidence to frame the opposing party candidate Donald Trump. Obama. Biden. Comey. McCabe. Strzok. Page. Rice. Etc.
Knowingly using the faked Clinton campaign ‘Steele Dossier’ hoax, they launched a federal investigation into the Trump presidential campaign that lasted three years after Trump was sworn in as the nation’s 45th President. Arresting and jailing his partners and colleagues. Inventing fake stories for their media enablers. Let’s repeat that. Saint Obama knew there was criminal activity in the process but let his henchmen try to fix an election.

And when the ruse was uncovered no one apologized. No one in authority was fired or jailed. The Pulitzer Prizes awarded to the NT Times and Washington Post for disseminating the DEMs scandal were not rescinded. Nor were they given back by the lying newspapers.
The concerted frauds of the same U.S. DOJ, FBI and State Departments were fed by media and accepted by gullible publics in Canada and America. The fantastical 2020 election results were likewise drummed into the public irrespective of the sudden “appearance” of 27 million new votes during a pandemic.
It was all a fitting preamble to the 2020-2024 Biden senility scandal with Democrats running a man they knew was in full dementia. In the 2020 election Biden was hidden from public view, the better to let media attack Trump for spurious charges launched by partisan DNC attorneys in Georgia, New York and DC. Even then it took the suppression of Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop just prior to the election to get his father elected.

The dance of denial continued in Biden’s term as he physically and mentally deteriorated before the American public. But inquiries about who was running the government if not Biden were harshly suppressed. Media lackeys noted he was sharp as a tack mentally and in tip-top physical condition when he wasn’t falling down stairs.
It took the stunning 2024 debate debacle with Trump to strip away the lies about Biden’s health, now said to be advanced prostate cancer and Parkinson’s. The media, caught in their own lies about Biden’s condition, offered no apologies and tried to blame Biden’s stutter for the performance.. Right.
These were the two greatest U.S. hoaxes from people who’d cried hoax incessantly. They were hardly the only abuse of public trust. Some of the perpetrators are said to now be under investigation— even as they hand out awards to each other. The media’s credibility is shattered and yet they still blame others. Jaded voters are taking a “we’ll see” approach. But expectations of any change in DC or Ottawa are limited.
As Stephen Taylor posted on X: “Turns out for Liberals, ‘elbows up’ just means ‘noses up’ like it always has.”
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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