The NBA scoreboard has turned into a stock ticker. Crowd chants, but half of them are watching their parlays instead of the play. Somewhere a coach calls timeout; somewhere else a bookmaker grins. This was always coming. The NBA invited gambling to the game when it signed lucrative sponsorship deals and paved the way for odds and offers to be splashed over our TV screens during games. So when the FBI finally showed up on Thursday, they were simply collecting the rent.
Portland head coach Chauncey Billups, whose playing career ended with his induction in the hall of fame, and Miami guard Terry Rozier were arrested Thursday in connection with an FBI investigation into allegations of illegal gambling and rigged poker games. Former player and assistant coach Damon Jones, who allegedly provided “inside information” about NBA games to bettors, was also taken into custody.
The FBI says Rozier told people close to him that he would leave a 2023 Hornets game early in a move that would help those in the know to haul in huge betting wins (the player’s lawyer says prosecutors “appear to be taking the word of spectacularly incredible sources rather than relying on actual evidence of wrongdoing”).
Billups, who has denied the allegations through his lawyer, is not accused of any wrongdoing related to the NBA, but is instead alleged to have taken part in rigged poker games with ties to the mafia. But even so, when the NBA got into bed with the big gambling companies, it normalized the culture of monetization of the game and the pitfalls and problems that come with betting.
If you want to see where gambling leads, look toward Texas, where casino magnate Miriam Adelson, billionaire heir to the Las Vegas Sands fortune and majority owner of the Dallas Mavericks, lobbies to build a super-casino–arena complex in the city’s heart. The project is pitched as “economic revitalization,” but what it really promises is basketball as bait for gambling.
The NBA has long said that its embrace of gambling creates transparency: regulated books flag anomalies, league partners share data, integrity units hum in the background. Sometimes that works. It’s how the Jontay Porter case was first detected, culminating in the league’s first lifetime gambling ban for a player in decades. Porter admitted to providing inside information, manipulating his on-court play while betting through an associate’s account. He pleaded guilty to federal charges.
That scandal signaled the house was full of smoke. Thursday’s news shows the flames of scandal are licking every part of the sport.
When betting becomes ambient, it lives inside broadcasts and marketing and apps and scrolls beneath the box score. Inevitably, the incentives around the game mutate. Prop bets don’t require a player to throw a game, only to miss a rebound, chase an assist or exit a game early with an “injury”. The economics are obvious. The temptations practical, even for players on millions of dollars a year. We are describing the machinations around one of man’s earliest sins.
Ryan Gayle is an NBA writer and co-host of The Knick of Time Show on YouTube. He has been critical of the NBA’s relationship with gambling agencies for years on the pdocast and sees the current controversy as chickens coming home to roost.
“The NBA’s betting scandal should be of no surprise to anyone since the NBA is lying in bed with sports betting companies such as FanDuel and DraftKings,” Gayle says. “It opens the door for players and coaches to inform bettors to help them cash out on bets. What’s more important, making money by being in bed with these gambling companies or protecting the integrity of the game and disassociating with sports gambling companies?”
The NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, once the leading evangelist for legalized betting, now urges restraint. He has asked partners to pull back prop bets and pushed for tighter regulation to protect players and curb the rising tide of hostility from losing bettors. The same ad inventory that fattens the league’s bottom line is teaching fans to view athletes primarily as financial instruments. It corrodes not only decorum but the core social contract of sport. And this is before we get into how the actual experience of watching a game is ruined by constant references to gambling and betting odds.
The post-2018 Supreme Court ruling that legalized sports betting in most US states has turned games into interfaces for gambling speculation. The NBA, a star-driven league built on stats, is uniquely vulnerable – although the NFL and MLB are far from immune.
To understand how this devolved so fast, consider anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, whose book Addiction by Design explores how machine gambling creates a trance of risk and reward. Sportsbooks and gambling apps are not slot machines, but their design is identical: frictionless deposits, micro-markets, and live-odds overlays. The product is no longer the basketball game but the wagering layered over it.
When scandals erupt, blame usually falls on the individual – the rogue player. But the broader ecosystem is performing exactly as it was designed: to drive engagement by slicing the game into ever finer pieces of speculation. Each slice creates a new opening for exploitation.
Even if courts eventually step in and address the problem, the image of an active player booked for gambling tells fans that the firewall between “the game” and “the book” no longer exists. For many fans, every missed shot may now look deliberate and every injury report feel suspicious.
The league’s integrity defense is now outsourcing checks and balances on sportsbooks to flag anomalies. The same corporations that profit from bets are policing the very behavior those bets incentivize.
Real reform would begin by eliminating bets on areas such as how many minutes a player appears in a game. It would establish an independent integrity clearinghouse with subpoena-ready data and authority to issue binding alerts. It would fund genuine harm-reduction programs for fans and expand security and mental-health protections for players who absorb the rage of bettors online. Advertising should be capped, especially during youth programming, and in-game betting prompts should disappear from broadcasts. But that’s asking a lot of a corporation that only takes moral stands when it helps its virtue-signaling performance art.
The scoreboard keeps ticking over. Odds blink like fireflies. A thousand invisible hands tap “confirm bet.” Somewhere a whistle blows, but the sound is lost under the buzz of push notifications.
The NBA has to decide what kind of meaning its product carries. If the game is now a matrix for wagers, scandals like this will recur, each one “mind-boggling,” each one predictable. If basketball is still a civic ritual, a shared act of skill and uncertainty, gambling must return to the periphery where it belongs.
