Insider IP Theft: Knicks sue Toronto Raptors for a Flagrant Foul
Fans of basketball are used to seeing bodies bouncing off one another as they race from one end of the court to the other, but rarely do we see an NBA franchise sue another for infringement and theft of intellectual property. That is exactly what is playing out in the courts of the Southern District of New York. The New York Knicks are suing the Toronto Raptors, their head coach Darko Rajakovic, their player development coach, Noah Lewis, and Ikechukwu Azotam, a former Knicks employee and currently a Raptors employee, as well as several anonymous individuals from the Raptors organization, for the illegal procurement of proprietary information.
The Crime
It is alleged that Azotam entered into a deal with the Raptors where he would pilfer a boatload of intellectual property from the Knicks and did so at the direction of the aforementioned individuals associated with the Raptors. While at the Knicks, Azotam held the position of Director of Video/Analytics/Player Development Assistant. That position provided him with unencumbered access to several Knicks assets, including the third party Synergy Sports Technology, which the Knicks use to analyze, repurpose, share and archive digital video content of basketball games. This, the Knicks believe, gives them a competitive advantage.
The allegation is that Rajakovic, in over his head as a first-time head coach, had Azotam provide the Raptors with as much information as possible so that the new Raptor’s coach would be able to hit the ground running. Azotam was happy to oblige, and apparently, he was to be rewarded handsomely for doing so.
Reactive Insider Risk Program in Place
The court filing indicated that the Knicks had a full-time cybersecurity team in place which included an “insider theft program.” It was this program that is credited with having identified the theft, albeit well after the horse had bolted from the barn. While the insider risk program identified the theft, it did not stop the theft, and the Knicks are chasing their data through the federal court system.
It helped that Azotam was clumsy when it came to orchestrating the theft of digital property; he inexplicably used his Knicks email address to send files containing proprietary information to his new Raptor’s email address. The forensic lift here was minuscule—all it took was a peek at Azotam’s email to discover the theft.
One of the emails contained the Knicks’ scouting reports on the Indiana Pacers, 250 identified plays used by the Pacers with their frequency stats and Pacers plays broken down by game time. A second email contained similar information about the Denver Nuggets including 270 plays.
But Azotam wasn’t finished—he was harvesting.
Azotam also sent the Raptors the Knicks’ 2022-23 season prep book; spreadsheets on plays from other franchises and more. He provided the login credentials for the Synergy Sports Technology services in early August and collected thousands of video clips of Raptor players on behalf of the Raptors from the service. But there was more—Azotam also shared zip files obtained from the Knicks’ Sharepoint file-sharing site, including 3,358 video files. It is alleged that the Raptors accessed the file share over 2,000 times in August 2023.
A Clear Case for Proactive Insider Risk Solutions
The case for proactive insider risk management solutions is obvious. Why the IRM team used technology that did not prevent the transference of data in a more proactive manner is unknown. A query sent to the Knicks went unanswered.
Image source: Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
