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Position Paper 1 - Crisis Public Relations

    Sometimes accusations of detrimental choices with little to no substantial evidence are made. In other instances, sometimes those claims seemed to be backed up by past actions or even come from people who are easy to believe. In the case of San Jose Sharks hockey forward, Evander Kane, the latter is true. Earlier this month, Kane’s estranged wife posted on her Instagram story claiming that he gambled on Shark’s games. This is quite the accusation considering the allegations also state that he was not betting on the Shark’s success, but instead against his own team. It was stated that he compromised games for those gambling purposes. These claims do not have solidified evidence to back them up, but the National Hockey League began an investigation into these claims.

    These accusations could look farfetched, but in her post, Kane’s wife claimed he has a gambling addiction. So in fact, these claims seem to be backed up. He has a long history with gambling. In April 2019, while in Vegas playing the Golden Nights, he gambled openly on table games and failed to pay a $500,000 casino marker from The Cosmopolitan. They filed a complaint but dropped the case in 2020. That is not the only situation regarding Kane's history with gambling issues. In January of this year, Kane filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. According to Kane, he lost lost $1.5 million dollars gambling over a 12-month span leading up to him filing for bankruptcy. Undoubtedly, the evidence against Kane regarding his stance with gambling make the claims about him betting on his own games seem somewhat realistic. @AJ26325993 on Twitter believes the same, stating, “I would like to believe you but you went into bankruptcy because of your gambling addiction, so her story doesn’t seem too far off.”

    Though the gambling aspect of Kane’s wife’s allegations seem to be the root of the news-worthy issue, she claimed as well that Kane was failing at his duties of a father. She claimed that she has no money to even buy formula and had to sell her wedding ring to have any money to survive. In typical crisis public relations form, Kane is obviously trying to publicly make it known that he would never disregard the wellbeing of his daughter, making a twitter post at Disney just fifteen days after his initial statement was released. Twitter users in his replies picked up on this as well. @KingQuong replied, “I feel like this screams ‘I have to discredit the allegations against me’.” @witty10 on Twitter stated “This pic is really good for repairing your image. Nice work.” The hate on this post does not compare to the hate he received on his post on July 3rd of this year, a first birthday post for his daughter. This post was made almost a month before the allegations, but the amount of hate in the replies reflected how many people felt about him after the claims were released. The ratio of replies to retweets was astronomical; people did not seem to care that this was a post celebrating his daughter, and instead used it as a platform to bash Kane. Only 37 of the 146 replies were positive ones wishing his daughter a happy birthday.

    Kane and his public relations team did a lot of things right when reacting to the allegations about his character as both a player and a father. Kane’s wife initially posted the allegations on her story on July 31st. His statement was released August 1st. That response time is the first thing he did right when addressing his crisis public relations plan. He had a very reactive response. He released two statements in one post, the first regarding the allegations of betting against himself and throwing games, and the second regarding the allegations against him as a father. His statement started off by stating that the allegations were false. Instead of trying to avoid giving an answer to the credibility of his wife’s claims, he immediately denied them. This allows no room for interpretation in his response. That was a strong point as well. As previously mentioned, Kane’s post on August 16th seemed like the reasoning was simply to appear that he was a good father. If that was the only reasoning behind it, it was a least a good choice regarding healing his image. All in all, Kane and his public relations team handled the situation the best they could. Despite Kane and his PR team taking care of the situation in a timely and efficiently way, there was one situation that stuck out to me that looked negative on Kane’s behalf. On August 10th, just ten days after the allegations, Kane posted a picture of him drinking at a restaurant. Regarding the situation he had found himself in, it just was not the best look. Many people in the comments agreed, saying things like, “Dude just does not give a f*@,” and “LOL so you acting like nothing happened.”

    Kane has done the most that he could and all that he can do now is leave it in the hands of the NHL as they run their investigation. So far ESPN has reached out to a few players who know Kane or have played with him. No one has sad that they have heard him mention making hockey bets. "Did he like to gamble? Sure. I just don't believe he was actually betting on hockey games," one active player said.

 

 

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