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Blue-Chip Blueliner: Anaheim Ducks defenseman Jacob Trouba is among the biggest names represented by KO Sports, which is selling significant assets to Wasserman.
Leila Devlin/Getty Images
Since launching a hockey representation practice in 2018, talent agency powerhouse Wasserman has built one of the largest groups in the sport, featuring two of the league’s biggest stars, Edmonton Oilers center Connor McDavid and Toronto Maple Leafs sharpshooter Auston Matthews, among 128 clients in the NHL and the developmental American Hockey League.
That division is about to get even bigger.
On Thursday, Wasserman will announce that it is entering a partnership with KO Sports, starting a process that will eventually end with the Denver-based boutique hockey agency folding into Wasserman’s hockey practice. The transition is reminiscent of Wasserman’s 2018 deal for an equity stake in Orr Hockey Group, which brought the agency into the sport for the first time; three years later, Orr agents and their clients were fully integrated into Wasserman.
For now, the KO banner will live on under Kurt Overhardt, who founded the firm in 1992 and has served as CEO. Simultaneously, though, Overhardt will become an executive vice president with Wasserman hockey and take four of his employees—Joe Oliver, Shawn Hunwick, Brian Schoelzel and Derek Langlois—with him to join the 15 agents and 13 additional team members already in place in the Wasserman division.
Of KO’s roughly 60 NHL and AHL clients, who include Anaheim Ducks defenseman Jacob Trouba and Carolina Hurricanes defenseman Jaccob Slavin, 55 will make the jump to Wasserman as well, and Overhardt will maintain an existing Sweden-focused affiliate relationship with AMA Sports Agency.
Wasserman, which is headquartered in Los Angeles, declined to disclose the financial terms of the agreement.
“We always think great agents lead to great clients, and as we were trying to fill out our hockey business to complete it with high-level operators and we looked around the industry, we really narrowed in on Kurt,” Jason Ranne, Wasserman’s president for global talent representation, tells Forbes. “And he liked our other top hockey people and felt like it was creating a powerful starting lineup in the hockey agency space.”
Although Wasserman is a relative newcomer to the sport, it has grown quickly, now managing $1.28 billion in active NHL and AHL playing contracts before the KO tie-up, according to data website PuckPedia, a figure that trails only Newport Sports Management’s $2.26 billion and CAA’s $2.14 billion among agencies. Acquisitions have accelerated that expansion, with Wasserman buying the Europe-focused Acme World Sports in 2020 and Vancouver-based PointsWest Hockey in 2021 and forming a “strategic partnership” with Montreal’s Momentum Hockey in September that saw the firm immediately take on the Wasserman name.
The spending spree has been accompanied by Wasserman acquisitions in other sectors—including digital creators and European soccer with September’s purchases of Long Haul Management and International Football Management—and by consolidation across the talent representation space.
When Forbes last published a list of the most valuable North American sports agencies, in 2022, a wave of M&A activity had already widened the gap between the industry’s haves and have-nots, and Wasserman ranked second with maximum commissions of $733 million, from an estimated $7.68 billion in playing contracts under management and $1.81 billion in non-playing contracts (such as marketing and media deals). Like Wasserman, fellow representation juggernauts CAA, WME, Excel Sports Management and Octagon have continued to snatch up smaller rivals in the years since, across a wide variety of sports.
The NHL is among the professional leagues now dominated by just a handful of agencies. Factoring in the KO deal, Wasserman will have more than doubled its hockey contracts under management since Forbes’ 2022 ranking, and the sport’s top five agencies—including Octagon and Quartexx Management alongside CAA, Newport and Wasserman—are responsible for roughly $8 billion in playing contracts combined, according to PuckPedia. The other 76 agencies currently representing at least one NHL or AHL client manage a total of $7.6 billion.
“I’ve never truly believed in, oh, it’s just straight-up consolidation—I think everyone’s living their own life and they’re making the best decisions for themselves and the clients,” Ranne says. “And we don’t just say grow to grow—we’re truly trying to fill in gaps and be the best we can for the clients and the agents.”
KO Sports founder Kurt Overhardt.
Stephanie Friday
Regardless of what exactly is driving the agency arms race, the added firepower was a selling point for Overhardt, who will be able to tap into Wasserman’s investment in areas including marketing, keynote speaking and entertainment. “Our resources are not tripled; they’re not even quadrupled—it is much larger than that,” he says.
During the year-plus of conversations that it took for the deal to come together, Overhardt was also attracted by Wasserman’s success recruiting and developing prospects from Finland and Switzerland, aligning with his own efforts alongside AMA CEO Pontus Noren in Sweden. Perhaps above all, however, Overhardt was excited by the chance to keep his team intact.
“I’ve had six different opportunities [to sell KO Sports] the last 10 years,” he says, “but so often in the service business, companies are just looking to get your clients and then destroy you and everything else—scorch the earth.”
On Wasserman’s side, the fit made sense, too, as the business of hockey changes. The NHL posted attendance and sponsorship records last season, and league-wide revenue crossed $7 billion for the first time, according to Forbes estimates. Teams are also appreciating faster than their counterparts in the other major North American pro leagues, rising 44% just last year to an average of $1.9 billion.
That new reality creates new earnings opportunities for players—and, by extension, agents—who have been stuck with the strictest salary-cap system in North American major pro sports since 2005. In that time, no player has topped the $17 million that legendary Colorado Avalanche center Joe Sakic reportedly hauled in on the ice during the 1997-98 season, under a deal coincidentally negotiated by Overhardt’s mentor, Don Baizley. (The inflation-adjusted value of $33 million has been even further out of reach.) Meanwhile, salaries in leagues such as the NBA have skyrocketed.
“You can be frustrated, but I also think you’ve got to be pragmatic, right?” Overhardt says, noting that the NHL’s salary cap, which is set at $88 million this season and is projected to rise to $113.5 million in 2027-28, is calculated based on the league’s income. “The only way players’ salaries are going to increase is if we increase hockey-related revenue. Can we become a $10 billion sport in the next five years? Can we become a $12 million sport in the next seven years?”
There is at least some optimism that the answer is yes, fueled by the success in February of the 4 Nations Face-Off, an international tournament that temporarily replaced the NHL’s All-Star Game, and by a new 12-year, $7.7 billion Canadian TV deal with Rogers Communications that was announced on Wednesday.
Players are also starting to see the kind of endorsement offers that have mostly been lacking in the sport to this point. (Consider that CAA’s hockey division manages just over $28 million in marketing contracts, against $2.1 billion in playing contracts.) In one sign of the potential upside, McDavid and Matthews, Wasserman’s star clients, now collect an estimated $6 million and $5 million annually off the ice.
Agencies are paying attention. Overhardt notes that, when he became certified in the early 1990s, “there were probably 20 agents in the world in hockey. Now I think there are over 250 registered” with the NHL Players’ Association.
“I think [the NHL and its players] are just scratching the surface in terms of experimentation and putting pressure on themselves to improve the commercial side of this stuff,” Ranne says.
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