One thing nobody will dispute is that Thursday was a victory for the scolds. All at once, they logged on, and logged in, and limbered up their Twitter fingers and sent them dancing across the keyboard like Herbie Hancock on the ivories.
A good old-fashioned gambling scandal was erupting, and they weren’t going to let it pass without imparting some grave moral lessons.
Look here, they said. The most important indictment announced by the U.S. Attorney’s Eastern District of New York office on Thursday wasn’t the one that laid out the charges against NBA guard Terry Rozier for his alleged role in a prop-bet-fixing scheme, or the one that detailed NBA head coach Chauncey Billups’ alleged involvement in rigging illegal poker games.
No, the important indictment was the metaphorical one handed down against the NBA itself. For embracing legalized sports gambling. For partnering with online sportsbooks like DraftKings. For prioritizing profit over the integrity of the game.
This wasn’t just criminals allegedly doing as criminals allegedly do. It was the inevitable end result of the NBA’s embrace of an industry that should not exist.
Again, according to the scolds.
But the scolds are wrong. In fact, their interpretation of Thursday’s events, and of last year’s Jontay Porter guilty plea in a separate investigation, is the exact opposite of the real lesson to draw. A world where people can gamble openly with reputable companies that operate within the jurisdiction of federal law enforcement and in cooperation with sports leagues is a world where any bad actors are likely to be caught. That is not the world as it used to be.
We all remember the old world, right? Pete Rose, Paul Hornung and Alex Karras, the Black Sox, Boston College and CCNY. These were some of the biggest individual or institutional names of their eras, all of them involving serious wagers on the outcomes of games over an extended period of time, most of them in concert with the criminal underworld.
The responsibility of protecting the integrity of games fell primarily on sports executives. Karras and Hornung, two of the NFL’s biggest stars in the 1960s, were suspended for a season as a result of commissioner Pete Rozelle’s investigation into players’ ties with bettors.
Nobody knows the old world as well as the NBA. Two decades ago, the league found itself mired in the biggest scandal of them all when it learned that referee Tim Donaghy had spent four years wagering on games that he officiated. Donaghy, a Delco native who attended Cardinal O’Hara, later claimed that 80% of his bets ended up cashing.
His gambling was eventually uncovered by an FBI investigation that resulted in prison time, but only after he’d inflicted four years’ worth of reputational damage on the league.
Compare the Donaghy scandal to what the feds laid out in their indictments on Thursday. Rozier is alleged to have provided nonpublic information to gamblers who bet on at least seven games between March 2023 and March 2024.
The indictment involving Rozier also includes mention of a “Co-Conspirator 8″ who provided gamblers with information about Portland Trailblazers personnel decisions, although Billups was not explicitly named. (Billups’ charges stem from a separate case involving the rigging of illegal poker games.)
The Rozier case stems from an earlier investigation into Porter, a then-Toronto Raptors player who later admitted in court that he manipulated his performance in two games. (Porter was banned from the NBA in the spring of 2024 and is currently awaiting sentencing in his case).
I don’t mean to minimize the seriousness of the cases involving Rozier, Billups, and Porter. Rozier and Billups deserve to join Porter with lifetime bans, and Billups should be removed from the Hall of Fame.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver and the league need to do some serious self-scouting to figure out if there is anything they can do beyond wielding heavy-handed punishment as a deterrent.
The scolds are correct in at least one regard. The NBA and its fellow sports leagues should seriously reconsider the extent to which they have encouraged the integration of betting with their telecasts and live events. The rise in popularity of betting on individual player props and so-called same-game parlay promotions has created a huge new front of incentives and avenues for malfeasance, packaged and promoted in a way that can feel more like fantasy sports than gambling.
It is more than fair to suggest that commissioners should create more distance between themselves and the sportsbooks, particularly when it comes to marketing.
Let’s not lose sight of the real issue. The leagues had no choice but to accept the reality of legal sports gambling. In the years before its adoption in the United States, overseas sportsbooks were exploding in popularity. Daily Fantasy cash games were already legal. Sports gambling was going to achieve critical mass at some point in the United States.
The decision that the leagues had to make was whether they wanted to help create a world where it could be regulated and policed most effectively.
We saw that world play out in Porter’s case. The gambling syndicate that attempted to profit from his prop bets was flagged due to the irregular nature of the wagers. The ability to detect abnormal betting patterns is the single biggest weapon in the fight against sports-fixing, and it should be the single biggest deterrent to anybody who attempts to engage in it.
The legalization of sports gambling is shifting all of the money that used to be wagered in the underworld onto audited books overseen by billion-dollar companies with sophisticated detection methods in place. It would be silly for a league like the NBA not to encourage that sort of framework in favor of one where forensic accounting is nearly impossible.
The cases of Rozier, Billups, and Porter are an indication that the world still isn’t perfect. But it is silly to suggest that stuff like this was less prevalent in the old world. We were just less likely to find out about it.
