Cosmopolitan Drops $500,000 Casino Marker Case Against NHL’s Evander Kane

Posted on: April 10, 2020, 09:41h. 

Last updated on: July 19, 2021, 01:22h.

Philip Conneller @casinoorgphilc Read More
Expertise: Gaming Business, Regulation, Tribal Gaming.

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas has dismissed a case against the San Jose Sharks’ Evander Kane that was seeking recovery of $500,000 in unpaid casino markers, The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports.

Evander Kane
Kane (left) has a longstanding rivalry with Ryan Reeves (right) of the Las Vegas Golden Knights. (Image: Yahoo Canada Sports)

The Cosmo sued Kane last November because the Canadian NHL veteran had been given eight lines of credit in amounts ranging from $20,000 to $100,000 on April 15, 2019, which he had not paid back.

Kane was in town that day because the Sharks were facing the Las Vegas Golden Knights in the NHL playoffs.

Letting Off Steam

The Cosmopolitan lawsuit demanded repayment of the markers plus legal costs from Kane, who signed a $49 million contract extension with the Sharks in 2018 and is expected to earn $8 million this year.

An attorney representing the Cosmopolitan, Lawrence Semenza, confirmed to the Review-Journal that the case had been dropped, but declined to comment on whether it had been settled out of court.

Kane may have had good reason to want to blow off some steam on April 15. This was the day after his team was beaten 5-0 by the Knights, and the Sharks forward was issued a game misconduct for dropping Knights defenseman Colin Miller with a left hook.

Kane has a longstanding and bitter feud with the Knights’ Ryan Reeves that goes back to their days playing against each other in the Western Hockey League.

Melnyk Fights Back

Kane is not the only NHL personality who has been recently chased for casino markers. In July, Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun launched a $1.05 million legal claim against Eugene Melnyk, the owner of the Ottawa Senators.

The casino claims pharmaceutical billionaire Melnyk issued five bank drafts for a total of $900,000 to fund a St Patrick’s Day weekend gambling spree in 2017. But his bank later failed to honor the drafts.

Melnyk is fighting back. His lawyers argue that the casino acted in bad faith when it “failed and refused defendant’s instruction to cash out defendant’s chips during a gambling session at a time when defendant was winning significant amounts of money, but induced defendant to continue to gamble, during which time plaintiff’s conduct caused defendant to incur substantial losses.”

But the king of unpaid casino credit lines from the sports world has to be former NBA champion Antoine Walker. In 2011, Walker was ordered by a court in Las Vegas to repay $750,000 in gambling debts he had racked up at three casinos in the city.

He pleaded guilty to one felony bad check charge and was sentenced to five years’ probation.