Basketball Hall of Famer and former United States Senator Bill Bradley, known as a staunch opponent of legalized sports betting, talked about the subject back in January. But he could just as easily have predicted the future.
“Well, there hasn’t been a scandal yet,” he said, explaining that professional sports has become increasingly intertwined with the gaming industry in recent years. “The worst has therefore been avoided, but all the conditions are in place for the unfortunate to happen. »
On Wednesday, the National Basketball Association confirmed that incident had occurred, banning Jontay Porter, a rarely used forward for the Toronto Raptors, for life. The league said Mr. Porter bet money on his own team to lose, pretended to be injured for betting purposes and shared confidential information with players.
“There is nothing more important than protecting the integrity of NBA competitions for our fans, our teams and everyone associated with our sport,” Adam Silverthe league commissioner, said in announcing Porter’s punishment.
Some fear that Porter is just the tip of the iceberg in American sports and that unless everyone – leagues, players, unions, politicians, betting companies – comes together to prevent further betting scandals, the very viability of professional sport is threatened. risk. The Porter affair was all the more disturbing because it came just weeks after that of baseball’s biggest star, Shohei Ohtaniwas embroiled in a gambling scandal when his longtime interpreter was accused of stealing millions of dollars from him to pay off an illegal bookmaker.
“When sports lose the perception of being honest, their sport dies,” said Fay Vincent, the former Major League Baseball commissioner who played a key role in banning hitting leader Pete Rose for life in his career, sports in the 1980s. because he bet on his own team’s matches.
Sports leagues and gambling companies argue that betting will occur whether the law allows it or not, so legalizing and regulating it protects gaming by making it easier to identify suspicious bets. (Sports gambling is now legal in 38 states.) That’s what the NBA says happened with Porter. Suspicious bets on a game involving Porter were brought to the NBA’s attention, according to the league, “by licensed sports betting operators and an organization that monitors legal betting markets.” A few weeks later, he left the sport.
Porter’s agent did not respond to a request for comment.
However, without the significance of the bet, it is not clear that any actions by Porter would have been detected.
About 15 people in NBA offices and four or five lawyers are involved in the league’s efforts to inform players about its gaming policies, as well as to monitor and enforce those policies. The league maintains relationships with private organizations that monitor gambling, such as US Integrity and Sportradar, as well as state gambling regulators and betting operators, all of which can alert the league of any activity suspicious activity that may involve players or other members of the league or team.
The NBA investigation found that someone associated with Porter bet $80,000 that he would perform poorly in a March 20 game. This type of bets, called prop bets, are not directly linked to the outcome of the match. Rather, these are bets on specific possibilities in the game, such as whether a player will score a certain number of points. Prop bets are often combined into a single bet called a parlay. Such bets have extremely low odds, but give high payouts if successful.
Against the Sacramento Kings on March 20, Porter played just three minutes before leaving with what the team called an illness. His associate’s $80,000 bet on his performance would have resulted in a $1.1 million gain if the suspicious activity had not been detected, the league said.
There are few sportsbooks in the country that would even accept an $80,000 bet on a prop parlay, let alone one involving a player like Porter.
The NBA said its investigation also found that, from January to March, Porter placed “at least 13 bets on NBA games using an associate’s online betting account.” Three of the bets were multi-game bets involving Raptors games – he didn’t play any of those games – and all were bets that the Raptors were going to lose.
Porter was a fringe player in the NBA, not necessarily the type who could guarantee that his team won or lost. But the individualized nature of many prop bets means that a larger number of players can have a more direct impact on the success of a bet. The president of the NCAA said he would like ban incidental bets involving college athletes.
Mr. Vincent said he was not particularly convinced that the current legal apparatus around sports gambling – made up of different league regulations and various state laws – combined with a generally enthusiastic public The idea of taking out your phone and betting $10 on a game was an effective system. to prevent or catch any problem bets. The NBA, like most professional leagues, has been pushing for a federal law that would regulate all sports gambling in the United States, although that doesn’t seem likely in the near term.
“I’m 85, so I won’t be there, but I don’t think the next 20 or 30 years are going to be a great story in terms of gambling in the sports world because the money is going to be so huge and wherever money is huge, corruption follows,” he said.
The NBA spends a lot of time educating its players on betting rules, including banning betting on basketball. The league does not allow the gambling companies it partners with to offer betting on its developmental league, the G-League, because it does not want to give players the opportunity to win less money than those of the NBA, tempted to bet on their own sport. Last year, players in National Football Lleague and National Hockey LThe league was suspended for violating betting rules.
And yet Porter, who received those trainings and earned about $2.7 million during his NBA career, which began in 2019 — and whose brother, Denver Nuggets power forward Michael Porter Jr., will earn 33 million dollars this season – still risked banishment.
Jontay Porter has often posted on social media about trading stock options and cryptocurrencies, and co-founded a business to teach others to do the same. Devin Mills, a professor in the department of community, family and substance abuse sciences at Texas Tech University, said it’s not uncommon to see those interests overlap with sports betting.
Mills said sports betting, similar to trading stock options and cryptocurrencies, was associated with “this kind of characteristic where individuals study and really think they can beat the system because “They know the game, they know the players, and there’s a kind of trend analysis.”
Options trading, speculating on cryptocurrencies and betting on sports are all activities that can now be done with just a few clicks on a smartphone. They’ve all exploded in popularity in recent years, especially with younger men who spend a lot of time online.
This is the crux of the problem with professional sports leagues, which encourage their fans to bet at the same time as they warn their players not to do so.
“Should we help them identify an alternative activity to stimulate their minds and emotions, so that they are not looking for rush in betting? » Mills said.
Jenny Vrentas reports contributed.
