Bill Bradley, a basketball Hall of Famer and former U.S. senator known as a staunch opponent of legalized sports betting, spoke on the topic in January. But he may have been predicting the future.
“Well, we haven't had any scandals yet,” he said, referring to how professional sports have become increasingly intertwined with the gambling industry in recent years. “The worst situation could have been avoided, but all the conditions are there for something untoward to happen.”
On Wednesday, the National Basketball Association acknowledged that misconduct had occurred and permanently suspended Jontay Porter, a rarely used backup forward for the Toronto Raptors. The league said Porter bet money so his team would lose, pretended to be injured for gambling purposes and shared his confidential information with gamblers.
“Nothing is more important to our fans, our teams, and everyone involved in the sport than protecting the integrity of NBA competition,” league commissioner Adam Silver said in announcing Porter's suspension. Stated.
Mr. Porter is just the tip of the iceberg in American sports, and unless leagues, players, unions, politicians, and gambling companies all come together to prevent further gambling scandals, the very existence of professional sports is in jeopardy. Some people worry that danger. The Porter case comes just weeks after baseball's biggest star, Shohei Ohtani, was involved in a gambling scandal in which his longtime interpreter was accused of stealing millions of dollars from him in payments to illegal bookmakers. What happened made me even more anxious.
“When a sport loses its sense of honesty, it dies,” said Fey, the former Major League Baseball commissioner who played a key role in banning lifetime hitting leader Pete Rose from the sport in the 1980s.・Vincent said. Because he was betting on his team's games.
Sports leagues and gambling companies argue that legalizing and regulating gambling would help protect the game by making it easier to identify suspicious bets, since gambling takes place regardless of whether it is legal or not. (Sports betting is now legal in 38 states.) That's what happened in Porter's case, the NBA announced. The league said suspicious bets in games involving Porter were brought to the NBA's attention “by licensed sports betting operators and organizations that monitor legal gambling markets.” After a few weeks, he retired from competition.
Representatives for Mr. Porter did not respond to requests for comment.
However, even if the stakes were not substantial, it is not clear whether any action by Porter would have been detected.
About 15 people from the NBA's office and four or five lawyers are involved in the league's efforts to educate players about gambling policies and monitor and enforce those policies. The league has relationships with private organizations that monitor gambling, such as US Integrity and Sportradar, as well as state gambling regulators and gambling operators, all of whom have relationships with players and other league and team officials. may alert the league to suspicious activity that may be involved.
An NBA investigation found that Porter's associates essentially bet $80,000 that he would perform poorly in the March 20 game. This type of bet, known as a prop bet, has no direct bearing on the outcome of the match. Instead, you bet on certain possibilities within the game, such as whether a player will score a certain point. Prop bets are often combined into his one bet called a parlay. These bets have very low odds, but the payoff is high if successful.
In a March 20 game against the Sacramento Kings, Porter played just three minutes and was sidelined when the team announced he was sick. The league said an $80,000 bet on his colleague's performance would have yielded a $1.1 million payout had the suspicious activity not been discovered.
There are very few sportsbooks in this country that would even bet $80,000 on a prop parlay, let alone one involving a player like Porter.
The NBA said its investigation also found that Porter placed “at least 13 bets on NBA games using a colleague's online betting account” between January and March. Three of his bets were multi-game parlays involving Raptors games, in which he did not play, and all were bets that the Raptors would lose.
Porter was a relatively unknown player in the NBA, and he wasn't necessarily the type of player who could guarantee he would have an impact on the team's wins or losses. However, many prop his bets have a personalized nature, allowing more players to have a more direct influence on whether or not their bets are successful. The NCAA president said he wants to ban prop bets involving college athletes.
Vincent believes that the current legal system surrounding sports betting (consisting of various league regulations and various state laws) is primarily aimed at people who are excited to pull out their cell phones and bet $10 on a game. He said that he was not particularly confident that the system would be effective in combination with the above. To prevent or capture any problematic bets. The NBA, like most professional leagues, is pushing for federal legislation to regulate all sports betting in the United States, but that seems unlikely in the short term.
“I'm 85 years old, so I'm no longer in this world, but I don't think gambling in the sports world will be easy for the next 20 to 30 years because there's going to be a huge amount of money. Corruption persists everywhere,” he said.
The NBA spends a lot of time educating its players about betting rules, especially the prohibitions against betting on basketball. The league does not allow its affiliated gambling companies to offer bets on the G League, which is a developmental league. They don't want to open up the possibility that players who earn less than NBA players will be tempted to gamble. own sport. Last year, players in the National Football League and National Hockey League were suspended for violating gambling rules.
But with all that training, Porter, who earned about $2.7 million in his NBA career that began in 2019, and his younger brother, Denver Nuggets wing Michael Porter Jr., will earn $33 million this season. However, they were still at risk of expulsion.
Jontay Porter frequently posts on social media about stock options and cryptocurrency trading, and co-founded a company to teach others to do the same. Devin Mills, a professor in Texas Tech University's Department of Community, Family and Addiction Sciences, said it's not uncommon for these interests to overlap with sports betting.
Mills said sports betting, like stock options and cryptocurrency trading, is a game where “the individual studies it, they know the game, they know the players, there are certain rules, so it's hard to beat the system.” “It's related to these kinds of properties that we actually think can be done.” Trend analysis. “
Options trading, cryptocurrency speculation, and sports betting can all now be done with just a few clicks on your smartphone. All of these have exploded in popularity over the past few years, especially among young men who spend a lot of time online.
This is the crux of the issue for professional sports leagues, which are warning players to avoid betting while simultaneously encouraging fans to bet.
“To prevent them from seeking excitement in gambling, do we need to help them identify alternative activities that stimulate their minds and emotions?” Mills said.
Jenny Vrentas Contributed to the report.
