Chauncey Billups exits a federal courthouse on Thursday following his arraignment on illegal-gambling charges.
Photo: Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images
Professional sports have withstood virtually every scandal: performance-enhancing drugs, labor-management battles, off-field violence, CTE — all of it. But that’s because of one fundamental understanding that underpins everything: This is all real. Players are trying their best to win; the games are on the level. If you lose that, if the games are fixed or the players are motivated by something other than the competition, the whole thing collapses. (This is why sports gambling was banned for nearly 100 years after the Black Sox scandal; it was understood by everyone involved, until very recently, that players and coaches gambling on their own games was sports’ third rail.) There’s no reason to watch a game you can’t believe in.
I have been arguing for years that scandals like this were inevitable. Though the massive gambling scandal that has engulfed the NBA on Thursday when federal prosecutors hit players and coaches with charges isn’t the equivalent of fixing the World Series in 1919, things like the Heat’s Terry Rozier allegedly making prop bets on a game is how something like that starts, and it’s very much in the same ballpark: manipulating a game, and your performance in that game, for reasons that have nothing to do with the game itself. It breaks down everything.
So what exactly happened?
There are two “separate but related” cases. The first involves illegal poker games rigged by various mafia crime families, a complex scheme complete with infrared scanners, in which players built up gambling debts they’d owe the mob. The primary sports connection here is that various NBA figures are connected, most notably Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups; their “celebrity,” such as it is, was a way to lure players into games in which the mob would then cheat them out of any winnings.
The other case involves players allegedly supplying insider information to gamblers. Rozier, who had been previously investigated for gambling issues, and coaches such as Lakers assistant Damon Jones, are accused of passing along info only they would know to gamblers, who then made bets in response. For example, when Jones allegedly learned a player would be sitting out a game, he texted gamblers the news early and said, “Bet enough so Djones can eat [too] now!!!” That player was LeBron James.
Oh, no, LeBron’s involved?
Not specifically: He didn’t know about any of this, though he is longtime friends with Jones. But he’s involved in the way everyone in the NBA is involved. He does, after all, do DraftKings ads with Kevin Hart.
This hardly makes him unique. But we’ll get to that.
But are players accused of throwing games, or purposely trying to lose?
No, not as of yet. The Rozier scandal, for example, involves betting player prop bets, specifically the under. You can bet, say, that a player will have fewer than four rebounds in a game, then the player can pull himself from a game before he reaches that number. This is what now-permanently banned player Jontay Porter admitted to last year and roughly what Rozier is accused of.
Wait, you can bet on how many rebounds a no-name player can get in a game?
Absolutely. Microbetting has become one of the more popular betting formats in a bet-on-your-phone age. You can bet on which team scores first, whether a player is about to make a free throw, or whether the first pitch of the game will be a ball or a strike. This is what Cleveland Guardians closer Emmanuel Clase, currently under investigation by Major League Baseball, is accused of doing: purposely throwing a ball on his first pitch after tipping off gamblers. A company that monitors betting markets for strange bets noticed an unusually high number of people betting that Clase would throw a ball, then he threw one. That started the investigation. That’s what happened with Rozier as well as Porter.
Well, that’s good, right? Isn’t that the system working?
This is the argument gambling advocates, including NBA commissioner Adam Silver, always make: Now that gambling is legal and out in the open, when someone is trying to cheat, these companies flag the abnormal bets and catch the person. (This is the one former sportswriter Bill Simmons is always making on his podcast, which, in a total coincidence, has many, many advertisers from the gambling industry.) This ultimately disincentivizes cheating because when players are caught, they will lose their careers. (As Porter did and as is likely for Rozier and Billups.) Sunlight, the thinking goes, is the best disinfectant: We are catching things we didn’t used to. Bad actors will learn they can’t get away with it.
Except, well, these scandals keep happening. Every league has dealt with them, repeatedly, in the seven years since the Supreme Court allowed states to legalize gambling in 2018. Bad actors seem to be missing the message.
So is the NBA rigged?
Let’s not get carried away. There have been all sorts of ridiculous videos (here’s one, but there are plenty) trying to make the case that players are constantly throwing games now, and we just don’t know about it.
This is highly unlikely: Even for gambling alarmists like myself, the notion that the NBA (and other sports) are entirely betrothed to gambling, and that players are constantly missing shots on purpose, is ridiculous: It is not 1919. It is unlikely, despite what gambling advocates claim, that these companies who look for gambling abnormalities like we saw with Rozier and Porter are catching each instance of this. But they’re not missing everything. There is no reason, to go back to the clip above, that Russell Westbrook would miss a shot by five feet to appease some gambler. (He’s just a bad shooter.)
So why is this happening?
Well, if leagues are trying to send the message that gambling is bad and their players should steer clear of it, they’re doing a terrible job of it what with the incessant advertisements for gambling apps during every television broadcasts, not to mention the regional network that broadcasts games throughout the NBA, NHL, and MLB, which is called the FanDuel Sports Network. There are also two NBA arenas, in Chicago and Washington, D.C., in which there is an actual physical sports book inside the arena. Leagues have taken billions of dollars in advertising and partnerships with the sports books, and ESPN actually has its own betting app, ESPN BET, which has been all over its coverage of this scandal since it happened.
Gamblers are going to gamble, something that was true before the Supreme Court made its ruling. But the idea that this recent plague of scandals isn’t connected to the fact that leagues, networks, and executives have been screaming, on every broadcast and from every arena, “Gambling is good and you should all do it, actually,” well, let’s say it strains credibility.
This is what the NBA, and other leagues, have opened themselves up to. That we are even having this conversation is an indictment of their decision to get in bed with professional gambling so wholeheartedly. One of the key parts of the indictment is that Rozier, Jones, and Billups were associating with “known gamblers.” You know who else associates with “known gamblers?” Every single person involved in the NBA, and every other pro sports league and now college. It is the height of hypocrisy to be disgusted that these players would put themselves in a position to be alongside “known gamblers” when every single broadcast is a constant attempt to recruit new ones. This is the bed the leagues made. They now have to sleep in it.
What happens next?
We’ll see what ends up going down with the FBI cases; I’ll confess to not exactly being blown away by the people in charge of that organization at the moment? But either way, it’s difficult, minus a total exoneration, to imagine Billups, Rozier, or Jones allowed in the league again. And sure: Maybe they will be the examples that stop any future players, in any sport, from getting involved in gambling in any way, despite literally everything that surrounds them, at every arena, during every game, on every telecast. This is what the leagues, and the gambling companies, believe, and are desperate for you to believe — this will all self-police, and these scandals will end. But does it feel like these scandals are ending to you? It sure feels like this is still all just beginning.
