When the podcaster Van Lathan heard about the sports-betting and poker indictments that ensnared two active N.B.A. figures last fall, it didn’t make him want to stop watching the N.B.A.
In fact, just the opposite. Mr. Lathan, who hosts shows about sports and culture on The Ringer, previously had little interest in the Portland Trail Blazers. But when the team’s head coach, Chauncey Billups, was arrested by the F.B.I. on the second day of the N.B.A. season and accused of working with the Mafia, Mr. Lathan wanted to know how the team would react. So he tuned in that night.
He wasn’t alone. In the days after the arrests, the N.B.A. had its most-watched opening week since 2017. Viewership the night the F.B.I. held its news conference was 60 percent higher than for the previous year. The league announced that Mr. Billups and Terry Rozier, the player involved, had been placed on leave, and then resumed promoting its new season.
“Nothing affected the games,” said Mr. Lathan, who argues that sports fans, particularly N.B.A. fans, like off-court drama as much as the game on the court.
Sports-betting charges are becoming a regular occurrence. Last Thursday, the Eastern District of Pennsylvania unsealed indictments against 20 college basketball players at 17 schools, accusing the players as well as gamblers of engaging in point shaving during games.
The N.C.A.A. does not allow its athletes to bet on sports, nor does it allow sponsorships from gambling companies. But gambling is so pervasive in sports that those rules may not matter.
Other betting indictments, levied against N.B.A. and Major League Baseball figures, have some observers wondering whether sports leagues’ hearty embrace of the gambling industry has led them to sacrifice the integrity of their games — and to what degree that might affect their business.
“The fans suffer in all of this,” said Tim Derdenger, an associate professor of marketing and strategy at Carnegie Mellon. “They stop trusting that it’s an actually fair competition. If they can’t trust it, they won’t watch it.”
But so far, even if fans are losing trust in the product, they’re still watching and the leagues keep making money.
Defining Integrity
Modern threats to sports integrity go well beyond sports gambling. Cheating, doping, tanking and match fixing have all chipped away at the supposed sacredness of what happens on the field.
For some people, the definition of integrity is simple. Players need to try as hard as they can to win. Others think it’s more complicated.
Léa Cléret, a philosopher who has been studying the question of sports integrity for years, first at European universities and then for international sports-related organizations including the World Anti-Doping Agency, thinks integrity means consistency among an organization’s purpose, values, rules and behaviors. But she also thinks the definition has gotten trickier.
“As the world of sport and the world of business have slowly been overlapping, there’s a big tension in the purpose,” Ms. Cléret said. “Is it a human relentless pursuit of excellence? Or is it a means to an end?”
In other words, when moneymaking conflicts with sports purity, which goal wins?
Match fixing can also be hard to define. The International Olympic Committee says it is when the result of a competition is predetermined. It also says broader competition manipulation is when a participant, coach, judge or referee “knowingly underperforms or deliberately makes bad or wrong decisions affecting the result or course of a competition, in order to obtain an undue benefit.”
But when underperforming is a strategic decision — to save strength for the next round of a competition, or to get a better draft pick in the next season, as has become common — the question of integrity gets murkier.
“Sport integrity is not about always putting in 100 percent effort,” said Minhyeok Tak, a lecturer in sport management at Loughborough University in England.
Mr. Tak believes gambling has muddied the discussion. Things like not sharing insider information with family or close friends are more about protecting the integrity of gambling than they are about protecting the integrity of sports, he said.
“The betting industry prefers the term sport integrity when they really mean betting integrity,” he said.
The Fan Reaction
It’s hard to know if things that harm the integrity of sports also hurt the business.
“It’s not something that we really have any empirical evidence for,” said Shawn Klein, an associate teaching professor at Arizona State University. But, he said, history offers some lessons. Boxing and horse racing were immensely popular in the early 1900s, he pointed out. Both sports were investigated for mob ties, and had multiple scandals in which a competitor was paid to lose or perform worse than expected. One reason they lost some standing with American sports fans was the sense that their competition “wasn’t always on the up and up,” Mr. Klein argues.
Most modern sports scandals that affect the integrity of the play typically do not involve losing on purpose. More often there is doping (as in Olympic sports and Major League Baseball) and cheating (as with the Spygate and Deflategate scandals in the N.F.L., and sign-stealing scandals in M.L.B. and college football).
Those transgressions come in the service of winning, which is the ultimate goal in sports, so they are perhaps easier for fans — at least the hometown ones — to get over.
Neither Deflategate nor Spygate stopped the runaway freight train of N.F.L. revenue growth. In 2024, the league reportedly took in more than $23 billion.
The practice of tanking, which happens often in today’s N.B.A., involves intentional losing. The Utah Jazz, a team many believe is tanking to secure a better draft pick, recently lost a game by 55 points to one of the worst teams in the N.B.A.
Tanking also happens in football, where the best draft picks go to the worst teams, and in baseball, where the revenue-sharing model means some owners value waiting to spend money until they have a real chance to win. In American sports leagues, teams cannot be demoted to a lower league if they lose too many games, as they can in some European leagues, particularly soccer. Because of this, they sometimes intentionally lose as many games as possible for a season or more to secure the best chance at good draft picks.
There is some evidence fans care. Hua Gong, a professor at Rice University, studied the relationship between tanking and attendance during the five seasons from 2013 to 2018. He and his co-authors found that the mere perception of tanking led to a decrease in attendance, and the effect persisted.
Mr. Gong said his paper showed that “you have to really protect the integrity of the game. And especially how people perceive whether the integrity of the game is there or not.”
N.B.A. fans have embraced unproven theories about rigged games and unfair drafts.
For instance, many thought that Game 6 of the 2002 Western Conference finals featured suspicious officiating that favored the Los Angeles Lakers over the Sacramento Kings, which helped the series go to seven games. A seven-game series increases ratings, and the Lakers, who play in a big market, draw a lot of eyes to the sport.
A few years later Tim Donaghy, who went on to serve prison time for his involvement in a gambling ring as an N.B.A. referee, said in a court filing that Game 6 had been fixed by the referees working it. And though Mr. Donaghy’s claims were never proved and the N.B.A. vehemently denied them, Neil Hunt, 49, a college administrator, hasn’t watched the N.B.A. much in the past two decades as a result.
“It comes back to that kind of feeling of like, ‘Am I a patsy here?’” Mr. Hunt said.
Adam Silver, the commissioner of the N.B.A. believes his league’s fans do care about the integrity of the game.
“I try not to take the comments personally,” Mr. Silver said during a news conference in Las Vegas in December. “But to the extent someone thinks that the league has a finger on the scale, the league cares which team wins, the league wants more games in a series rather than less games or a particular outcome, I think that’s incredibly corrosive to the game.”
The N.B.A., which has partnerships with gambling companies, changed its injury-reporting rules last month in an attempt to close a loophole exploited by gamblers who had access to insider information. Mr. Silver said the league would like to see a ban on prop bets (bets on specific occurrences within games) and bets on unders (where a bettor can wager that a player will underperform his expected statistics) as well. The league has also made several changes to its draft rules in recent years to discourage tanking.
But neither tanking nor unproven theories have depressed the overall business of the N.B.A. With sports a last vestige of monoculture, streamers fight over the rights to air games. This year was the N.B.A.’s first under its new media rights deal, which has Disney, Amazon and NBC paying around $76 billion over the next 11 years. The league expects to take in more than $14 billion in revenue this season, up from $12 billion two years ago.
“We are in the golden age of cheating and dishonesty in sports,” Mr. Lathan, the podcaster, said. “And nobody cares.”
Tania Ganguli writes about money, power and influence in sports and how it impacts the broader culture.
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