I may be revealing a secret that columnists around the world cherish, but I admit that among the columns we like to write, most of them fall into the “I told you so” genre.
Case in point: Last April, in a column about then-translator Shohei Ohtani's gambling snafu, I warned that professional sports leagues' enthusiasm for betting would lead to will inevitably cause a major scandal.
“It may not manifest itself for months or even years,” I wrote, “but it will happen.”
Place a big bet on Milwaukee today.
– Damon Jones' alleged message to players after learning LeBron James would not play in the Lakers-Bucks game.
The calendar, as it turned out, counted down 19 months. Last Thursday federal prosecutors filed charges National Basketball Association. player Terry Rozier and former NBA player and assistant coach Damon Jones for fraud and money laundering in connection with a betting scheme on NBA games. Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups indicted separate charge by linking him to a Mafia scheme to fix poker games; Jones was also named in that indictment.
The NBA placed Billups and Rozier on leave. They are both scheduled to appear in federal court in Brooklyn within the next few weeks to enter guilty pleas, although both have maintained their innocence.
The league may have a hard time washing its hands of this mess. All professional sports leagues spent years shunning gambling as a threat to their public image of integrity before embracing the siren call of major sports betting, attracting gambling companies and their ever-growing customer base to their tents. But the NBA was ahead of the crowd.
IN and 2014 articleNBA Commissioner Adam Silver effectively called the “uncle” in the league's fight against gambling.
“For more than two decades,” he wrote, “the National Basketball Association has opposed the expansion of legal sports betting, as have other major professional sports leagues in the United States.” The leagues backed a 1992 federal law banning sports betting, except in legacy places like Las Vegas.
They took a tough stance against players and staff caught betting on their games and sports, beginning in 1919 with the so-called Black Sox scandal, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of rigging the World Series to benefit a gambling establishment. Major League Baseball hired strict federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as its commissioner and gave him unlimited powers to impose order on the game. He permanently banned eight players from baseball.
Recently, as Silver noted in his article, Americans' appetite for sports betting has only increased. Accordingly, he called for the practice to be legalized so that it could be “brought out of the underground and into the sunlight where it can be properly monitored and regulated.”
(The 1992 law was overturned by the Supreme Court, and legalized sports betting has spread from coast to coast.)
Given subsequent events, Silver can be credited for his childlike innocence in the expectation that the government would regulate an industry that collects billions of dollars a year from millions of users, with legal permission.
Silver wrote that among his “most important responsibilities as NBA commissioner are protecting the integrity of professional basketball and maintaining public confidence in the league and our sport.”
When I asked the NBA if Silver had changed his mind about his 2014 article, the league responded, “We continue to believe that the legal, regulated and monitored sports betting market is far superior to the illegal, underground one,” and suggested that a single federal regulator would be preferable to the current patchwork of state-by-state operations, although the activities alleged in the federal indictments conclusions will almost certainly be a crime in any state. During a television interview Friday, Silver said the case left him with a “pit in my stomach.”
The league's ability to control the behavior of its people is questionable. Consider the Charlotte Hornets game against the New Orleans Pelicans on March 23, 2024. According to the indictment, Rozier told the gambling conspirators that he would quit the game early, allowing them to profit from bets that his statistics would fall short of bookmakers' expectations.
The NBA, alerted by sports betting companies about Rozier's “abnormal behavior” in the game, investigated but later said it could detect any “violation of NBA rules.”
The NBA can hardly claim to be blindsided by the new allegations. Just last year, another federal gambling case involving NBA games broke.
In this case prosecutors argued that a player named Ammar Awaude forced then-Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter to leave the game early. This caused players aware of the arrangement to bet that his in-game statistics would fall short of expectations; Prosecutors said the insiders made more than $100,000 from their bets.
According to text messages included in the 2024 indictments, Awoude admitted that he “forced” Porter to participate in the scheme to help pay off some of his gambling debts.
Awaude negotiated a plea deal in the case, but the outcome was uncertain. Porter pleaded guilty to related federal fraud charges and is scheduled to be sentenced in December. The NBA suspended Porter for life.
Awaude was also named in an indictment handed down last week on charges of poker fraud.
In recent years, professional leagues have moved closer to the gambling industry, saying their interest is simply in “fan engagement”—that is, keeping viewers in front of their TVs even during big games.
Only 11 states have banned sports gambling Today. These include Utah and Hawaii, both traditionally anti-gambling, and California, which rejected a 2022 measure to legalize sports gambling. As I mentioned in 2024, the dangers of this expansion are clear.
They created a new underclass of gambling enthusiasts while largely failing to live up to the claims of their advocates that government-sponsored and regulated gambling would create a new, risk-free system. revenue flow to state and local budgets. The results of some games were suspect even if no evidence was found to fix them.
The leagues have gone beyond simply tolerating gambling; they have entered into partnerships and sponsorships with major sports gambling companies. Two leading companies, FanDuel and DraftKings, are the official corporate gaming partners of the NBA, National Football League and Major League Baseball.
During game broadcasts and broadcasts, you can often see in-game statistical predictions on the screen—for example, what are the odds of this hitter hitting a hit or hitting a home run.
During the seventh inning of Saturday's Game 2, Fox projected that there was a 36% chance that Yoshinobu Yamamoto would pitch 9+ innings. (He moved away.)
The only reason to offer such predictions is to satisfy the appetite for in-game offers or “backing” bets. Essentially, these are bookmaker estimates. They don't tell casual viewers anything they need to know to enjoy the upcoming innings, but they do give players something to think about before throwing money at the “Will Yamamoto present a full game?”
In-game betting has proven to be like heroin for the vulnerable, offering instant gratification (or frustration). They 'could be associated with risky gambling behavior,” reports the National Council on Problem Gambling. actively advertises bets on its bookmaker web page.
In a memo released Monday, the NBA singled out prop betting as a problem area: “In particular,” the memo said, “proposed bets on individual player performance raise heightened integrity concerns and require additional scrutiny.”
The biggest gaming companies have introduced new ways to get players to place bets. For example, applications for smartphones. In the old days, no one could place a legal bet on sports without traveling to Las Vegas, which is a deterrent to problem gambling. Today, anyone with a smartphone can place a bet, often without verifying their age or financial capabilities.
“The advent of smartphones in 2007 and the Supreme Court decision in 2018 opened the door Fully legal gambling 24 hours a day, 7 days a weekproblem gambling experts Jonathan D. Cohen and Isaac Rose-Berman wrote recently.
I asked FanDuel and DraftKings if they were taking any responsibility for the gaming issues in the US. DraftKings did not respond. A FanDuel spokesperson told me via email that the company “takes problem gambling seriously and continually works to identify risky behavior… including when a customer tries to deposit significantly more than they normally would” or “excessive time on the site chasing losses or customer service interaction signals.” In such cases, the company will sometimes set deposit limits or timeouts, or may exclude the user entirely.
This brings us to the latest allegations. The feds identified seven NBA games in 2023 and 2024, including a 2023 game in which Rozier allegedly warned co-conspirators about his decision to remain on the bench.
Among other things, there was a 2023 Trail Blazers game in which players were told that the team would draft its best players to lose, thereby gaining a better position in the upcoming NBA draft; and two Lakers games in which Jones allegedly tipped players star LeBron James, a friend since they played together on the Cleveland Cavaliers, was injured and did not want to play.
“Bet big on Milwaukee tonight,” Jones allegedly told a contact before Game 1 against the Milwaukee Bucks. James survived and the Lakers lost. James was not named in the indictment, but descriptions of his roles helped identify him. James has made no public comments about the case, but he has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
Can anything stop this tide? A reasonable bet at this point is “no.” Too much money is riding on the continued expansion of sports betting: DraftKings has more than doubled its revenue since 2022, reaching $4.8 billion last year, and nearly doubling its average monthly users to 3.7 million. FanDuel is owned by a British gambling conglomerate, making its US sports revenue difficult to analyze.
That's a lot of money to spend on promoting sports gambling, making it harder for governments to regulate and making it harder for sports leagues to turn a blind eye to revenue. Maintaining your image of integrity in this world of greedy and needy players and insatiable players will only become more difficult.
