Last week, the NBA was rocked by the indictments of three current and former players, including the current coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, in connection with sports betting and rigged poker games. I with talked my colleague Bryan Walsh, who oversees Vox’s Future Perfect, about the crisis the indictments create for the league — and larger crisis of widespread sports gambling in the US. Our conversation for Vox’s daily newsletter, Today, Explained, is below, and you can sign up for the newsletter here for more conversations like this.
What happened in the NBA last week? What were these indictments about?
So on Thursday morning, the FBI, the New York Police Department, and New York state officials announced indictments around a really massive illegal sports betting and illegal poker ring that included several current and former NBA players, among them current guard for the Miami Heat Terry Rozier, as well as the current coach of the Portland Trail Blazers and Hall of Famer, Chauncey Billups.
They were accused of essentially giving gamblers inside information into things that they do in games that would allow them to make bets they knew would win — an insider trading system, only for sports gambling.
This is not just a problem with the people who were indicted. It’s a big deal for the NBA. Why is that?
This is a huge deal for the NBA, really for all sports leagues, because ever since the door was opened to widespread legalization of sports gambling in 2018, there have been concerns that something like this would happen, that you would have a gambling scandal that involved actual current players doing things to really question the integrity of the games.
And that’s really a function of the fact that sports gambling has gotten so massively huge in the US in just a very short period of time. You can go to sports arenas and you will see betting lounges, things that would’ve been impossible to imagine just 10 years ago. The fact that a bunch of new apps, like your DraftKings, your FanDuel, that enable bettors not just to bet on the outcome of the game, but little micro bets, prop bets, like, “How many minutes will a player play? Will he play the whole game?” — these are all things that are much more easy to manipulate for people on the inside.
What does the US appetite for this kind of expanded sports gambling look like?
It’s enormous. One survey recently said about 20 percent of US adults had either placed a bet in the last year on sports or had an active online account. I think the latest number is north of $10 billion, and much of that money does flow to the sports leagues through their sponsorships.
Anyone who watches games now will be inundated with ads for DraftKings, FanDuel, every kind of sportsbook. It has become a major pillar of the sporting industry in the US, and it’s only set to continue to grow. There seems to be no brakes on this whatsoever. And a big part of it is the growth of these online mobile apps.
When you put people in that sort of frictionless environment with apps that were engineered to get your attention and keep it, and you pile on all the advertising, it’s not surprising it’s grown like this, and it’s also not surprising it’s now having a really negative impact on sports leagues. I doubt very much this is the last we’ll hear of a scandal like this one.
Has the league said anything? How are officials responding so far?
The NBA mostly said that they’re reviewing the federal indictments. They put Rozier and Billups on immediate leave from their teams. They say they’re going to cooperate. They say that they take the allegation very seriously, and that the integrity of their game remains their top priority.
What I would say with that is if the integrity of your game was truly your top priority, you probably would not be involved with betting to the degree they are today. The belief in the integrity of the sport is something where, if there are any small cracks, it can really have long-term effects. For decades, sports leagues were so against the possibility of legalizing gambling because they knew that in the past, there had been major scandals — people might remember the 1919 White Sox throwing the World Series.
In fact, in the run-up to the 2018 Supreme Court decision that led to the explosion of legalization, these leagues were actually against it. They didn’t want this to happen. But once the door was opened, it was either join or forgo billions of dollars.
What kind of impact has this proliferation of gambling had on bettors?
The huge boom in sports gambling has also led to a lot of human carnage. We’ve seen huge spikes in calls to gambling hotlines. In the years since legalization, we’ve seen research that indicates that people who are more involved in the gambling world have lower savings rates. It has a real, serious impact on people. And one thing about the way it’s done now is that it’s essentially inescapable. For someone struggling with a gambling addiction, it’s almost like you’re an alcoholic and every room you walk into is a bar.
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