Bill Bradley, a basketball Hall of Famer and former U.S. senator who is known as a staunch opponent of legalizing sports betting, spoke about the issue back in January. But he might as well have predicted the future.
“Well, there hasn’t been a scandal yet,” he said, explaining how professional sports have become increasingly intertwined with the gambling industry in recent years. “So the worst has been avoided, but all the conditions are in place for something unexpected to happen.”
On Wednesday, the National Basketball Association confirmed that the accident had occurred and imposed a lifetime ban on Jontay Porter, a rarely used backup forward for the Toronto Raptors. The league said Mr. Porter bet money that his own team would lose, pretended to be injured for betting purposes and leaked confidential information to players.
“There is nothing more important than protecting the integrity of NBA competition for our fans, our teams and everyone associated with our sport,” league commissioner Adam Silver said in announcing Porter’s punishment .
There are those who fear that Porter is just the tip of the iceberg in American sports and that the viability of professional sports is at risk unless everyone – leagues, players, unions, politicians, betting companies – comes together to prevent further betting scandals at risk. The Porter case was all the more disturbing because it came just weeks after baseball’s biggest star, Shohei Ohtani, was embroiled in a gambling scandal when his longtime interpreter was accused of stealing millions of dollars from him to pay an illegal bookmaker.
“When the sport loses the perception that it is honest, its sport dies,” said Fay Vincent, the former commissioner of Major League Baseball who played a key role in the 1980s in expelling career hits leader Pete Rose for life from the sport because he bet on his own team’s games.
Sports leagues and gambling companies argue that betting occurs whether the law allows it or not. Therefore, legalization and regulation protects the games by making it much easier to identify suspicious bets. (Sports gambling is now legal in 38 states.) That’s what happened to Porter, according to the NBA. Suspicious bets on a game involving Porter were brought to the NBA’s attention “by licensed sportsbook operators and an organization that monitors legal betting markets,” according to the league. A few weeks later he was gone from the sport.
Porter’s agent did not respond to a request for comment.
However, without the significant size of the bet, it is not clear whether any of Porter’s actions would have been discovered.
About 15 employees in the NBA’s offices and four or five attorneys are involved in the league’s efforts to educate players about its gambling policies and 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 companies, all of which may alert the League to suspicious activity that may involve players or other league or team personnel .
The NBA’s investigation found that someone associated with Porter bet $80,000 that he would essentially perform poorly in a game on March 20. These types of bets, called prop bets, are not directly related to the outcome of the game. Instead, these are bets on specific possibilities in the game, such as whether a player will reach a certain number of points. Prop bets are often combined into a single bet called a parlay. Such bets have extremely low odds, but bring high payouts if successful.
Against the Sacramento Kings on March 20, Porter played just three minutes before exiting with what the team said was an illness. His partner’s $80,000 bet on his performance would have resulted in a $1.1 million payout had the suspicious activity not been discovered, the league said.
There are few sportsbooks in the country that would even take an $80,000 bet on a prop pay, let alone a bet with a player like Porter.
The NBA said its investigation also found that Porter placed “at least 13 bets on NBA games through an affiliate’s online betting account” from January to March. Three of the bets were multi-game bets involving Raptors games – he did not play in any of those games – and all were bets that the Raptors would lose.
Porter was a marginal player in the NBA, not exactly the type who was guaranteed to have an impact on whether his team won or lost. However, because many prop bets are individualized, more players have the opportunity to have a more direct impact on the success of a bet. The president of the NCAA has stated that he would like to ban prop betting involving college athletes.
Mr. Vincent said he wasn’t particularly convinced that the current legal apparatus surrounding sports gambling – consisting of different league regulations and varying state laws – combined with a public largely eager to pull out their phones and bet $10 on a game , is an effective system to prevent or intercept all problematic bets. The NBA, like most professional leagues, has pushed for a federal law that would regulate all sports gambling in the United States, although that doesn’t appear likely in the near future.
“I’m 85 years old, so I won’t be around anymore, but I don’t think the next 20 or 30 years will be a nice story about gambling in the sports world because the money will be so huge, and wherever “The money is huge, corruption follows,” he said.
The NBA spends a lot of time educating its players about betting rules, particularly the basketball betting ban. The league doesn’t allow the gambling companies it works with to offer betting on its development league, the G-League, because it doesn’t want to open up the possibility that players who make less money than NBA players will be tempted to to bet on this league in your own sport. Last year, players in the National Football League and National Hockey League were suspended for betting rule violations.
And yet Porter, who received those trainings and earned about $2.7 million in his NBA career that began in 2019 – and whose brother, Denver Nuggets winger Michael Porter Jr., made $33 million this season US dollars will still earn banishment.
Jontay Porter often posted on social media about trading stock options and cryptocurrencies 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 unusual for these interests to overlap with sports betting.
Mills said that sports betting, similar to stock options and cryptocurrency trading, “comes with this type of characteristic where individuals study and really believe that they can beat the system because they know the game, they know the players and There is such a thing as trend analysis.”
Trading options, speculating with cryptocurrencies and sports betting are activities that can now be done with just a few clicks on a smartphone. They have all become increasingly popular in recent years, particularly among younger men who spend a lot of time online.
That’s the crux of the problem for professional sports leagues, which encourage their fans to bet while warning their players against it.
“Do we need to help them find an alternative activity that stimulates their minds and emotions so they don’t seek the high of betting?” Mills said.
Jenny Vrentas contributed reporting.
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2024-04-21 09:01:03
www.nytimes.com
