As long as there has been competitive sport, I’m pretty sure there was someone whispering something to somebody.
Take the first 100-yard dash, held over 300,000 years ago on the African plains.
OOG: I’m going to win this race!
MOOG: I’ll give you three pebbles and a branch if you lose on purpose.
OOG: Done. I’ll make it look good, don’t worry.
But despite a long and storied history of gambling scandals and sports — oh heck, here’s a handy, if incomplete, rundown:
In baseball, there were Jim Devlin and other members of the Louisville Grays kicked out in the 1870s, the eight “Black Sox” players who were banned after the 1919 World Series fix, Pete Rose getting exiled for betting on his own team. Then’s there’s Paul Hornung, Alex Karras, and Art Schlichter, who were caught wagering on NFL games. Hockey players Babe Pratt, Billy Taylor, and Don Gallinger faced punishment. College basketball? Kentucky’s Ralph Beard, Alex Groza, and Dale Barnstable; CCNY’s Ed Roman, Alvin Roth, Ed Warner, and Floyd Layne; and Columbia’s Jack Molinas shaved points for gamblers, a pattern that repeated with Arizona State’s Stevin Smith and Isaac Burton, plus players at Boston College and Toledo years later. Tennis players Daniel Kollerer and Franco Feitt were banned for match-fixing, jockey Anthony Ciulla bribed riders including Jorge Velásquez and Angel Cordero Jr., and NBA referee Tim Donaghy went to prison for betting on games he officiated. Not to mention soccer overseas, such as players Peter Swan, Tony Kay, and David Layne, who fixed matches in England, while Italy’s Totonero scandal swept up Paolo Rossi and others, and lower-league players Michael Boateng, Delroy Facey, and Moses Swaibu were later jailed for the same.
So, yes, despite this long and storied history of gambling scandals and sports, many people are mistaking the repealing of PASPA and the launch of legal online sportsbooks as the cause of the NBA betting scandal that started with Jontay Porter and continues with Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups.
It’s not. There were sports betting scandals before the legalization of online sports betting, and there would be sports betting scandals if all the regulated online sportsbooks disappeared tomorrow.
As such, there were — are? — probably more scandals we just don’t know about.
How many more?
Truth is, we don’t know how many other would-be scandals throughout the history of sport went unnoticed. After all, only 44% of murders get solved in America; you’d think an enterprising young man would be able to get away with missing a shot or two on the hardwood without so much as anyone raising an eyebrow.
Today though, post-PASPA — and in the regulated market — big bets and weird activity get noticed, flagged, investigated. While I’m not in the Kash Patel inner circle, I’m confident in saying most every scandal we’re seeing play out now post-PASPA is definitely more a Sportradar type of bust than an Elliot Ness type of bust.
But either way, here we are.
So, in this environment, is there anything the NBA can do to make sure this type of thing never happens again, to make sure the non-gambling media stops clutching its collective pearls?
NBA can take steps to help (a little)
Perhaps if we all lived in a communist utopia, but other than that … no. Money talks.
Is there anything the NBA can do to lessen the chances?
Well, it can shape up the injury reporting, for starters, as it’s messy at best. To be fair, it’s a ton better than it used to be, when it seemed like there were no rules. Players would be ruled “out” after the posted game time, for instance.
Now, injury reports have to be out by 5 p.m. the day before the game, and by 1 p.m. for back-to-backs. Additionally, final determinations must be made 30 minutes before game time.
So it’s better, but there’s room for improvement.
The teams should be forced to keep leaking out information as they get it. The Athletic, for instance, pointed out that Luka Doncic of the Lakers didn’t travel to Sacramento the day before for a game last week, but he wasn’t ruled out until the following afternoon.
Obviously — obviously! — there were plenty of people who knew that Doncic was left behind in L.A. Could they have profited from this information? How many times can I write the word “obviously” in a sentence?
So there’s a fix: The moment a team knows about something that might affect the injury report, it should release it.
The league can also figure out a way to eliminate tanking, as that’s where Billups allegedly got himself in trouble (besides the poker thing). He — or at least a person matching Billups’ exact biography — told one of the alleged conspirators the Blazers would be resting their starters in a meaningless game in an effort to tank for a better chance at the No. 1 draft pick.
That’s bad, obviously, but so is tanking. I mean, it’s wrong for Billups to leak that information, but one could argue the “sanctity of the game” is worse off when teams PURPOSEFULLY TRY TO LOSE. Sorry for hollering, but come on.
Then there’s the whole “load management” thing, which also needs to be ironed out.
Listen: These NBA players are running longer, harder, and faster than ever before — two miles more per game, in fact, than 10 years ago, when they started tracking this stuff. Honestly, it’s probably double what players in the 1970s were running.
And it’s an 82-game schedule, sometimes with four games in five nights, plus four rounds of playoffs. All told, it’s a load that needs management.
So let’s — again — be as upfront as we can. A player sitting because of load management should definitely be a “day before” type of announcement.
Then, of course, there’s the bets themselves. I’ve heard plenty of arguments that we don’t need Jontay Porter unders, we don’t need Terry Rozier micro-markets. I get it, I understand it, and I also know the cat is out of the bag. You think Joey Mafia cares at the end of the day if the fix is in via DraftKings or FanDuel as opposed to some offshore operation or Joey Mafia’s cousin the bookie? I don’t think so. The markets can be made, so they will be made. Simple as that.
All told, the Rozier and Billups alleged “crimes” are certainly a rough scene for the NBA. But thinking that A) it’s the fault of online sports betting, B) that it hasn’t happened before, and C) that it won’t happen again is D) foolish.
Best we could hope for? Education for the players and fewer opportunities for bad actors to capitalize on privileged information by keeping the information flow as wide as humanly possible.
