Above All, the NBA Will Protect the Gambling Industry
In the face of betting scandals, the NBA will do anything—except endanger the gambling apps sucking dry the league’s most vulnerable fans.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver.
(Chase Stevens / Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)Two weeks ago, when a betting scandal rocked the National Basketball Association, the lurid headlines flashed so brightly you needed UV sunglasses to read the text. Stories about Hall-of-Fame-player-turned-head-coach Chauncey Billups being the face of Mafia-run corrupt poker games alongside people with names like “Albanian Bruce” and “Black Tony” guaranteed maximum attention. The other part of the story involves the Miami Heat’s Terry Rozier, who the NBA had previously investigated and found no wrongdoing but the feds say gave insider information to friends who made bets based upon his intel. Kash Patel, the FBI chief, children’s book author, and free-flight enthusiast, said that this would just be the beginning of the investigation.
Now, as the dust has cleared, it’s time to also clear away the bullshit and talk about what is really at play. First, let’s remove Billups’s involvement in rigged poker games. Let’s agree that if these charges are true, getting involved in Mafia “smokers”—New York City outer-borough slang for illegal card games—is a bad idea for a head coach. It’s also been happening as long as there has been organized crime, which roughly coincides with the beginning of professional sports. If this sounds dismissive, it’s because these “smokers” have nothing to do with what this case is really about. This story is not about “Albanian Bruce” and high-tech cheating at cards. It’s about the fear that “federal investigation” is really just code for “payback.” And it’s about the NBA’s fear that if fans begin to doubt the legitimacy of the sport, it could put at risk billions of dollars in revenue from legal gambling.
The investigation stretches back into the Biden administration, but there is no mistaking when the indictments went public: the opening week of the NBA season. We are living under a regime that practices a politics of revenge against US companies and citizens. And during Trump’s first term, the NBA was a thorn in his side, with comments on social media from numerous players including LeBron James putting him on blast. The championship teams during the first Trump term refused to visit the White House, although the petulant Trump would screech online that they were never invited. The NBA also did a massive get-out-the-vote campaign and even opened up arenas as ballot-casting locations. Given the political proclivities of the NBA’s audience and the players’ opposition against Trump, it was a thinly veiled effort to push the president out of the White House.
Even more so than the men’s league, the WNBA—which is overseen by the NBA—foiled Trump’s electoral plans. Players helped prevent the Atlanta Dream franchise owner, Trumpist Kelly Loeffler, from becoming a senator from Georgia and encouraged their fans in the Peach State to vote for the Rev. Raphael Warnock, who won by the narrowest of margins. They even successfully pushed Loeffler, an open critic of players’ standing up to racist police violence, to sell the franchise. It does not take a tin-foil hat to believe that Trump’s desire for revenge could have played a role in Patel’s announcement. Even ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, an increasingly frequent Fox News guest whose politics keep stomping to the right, said that this was all about Trump putting his foot on the NBA’s neck and harpooning it right at the start of the season. Patel took the time to slam Smith, denying that the exquisite timing was anything but coincidental.
But neither crooked poker games nor the FBI’s ham-handed timing are what now furrows NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s slender brow. It’s the fear that the legalized gambling he so fulsomely fronted for over a decade ago could affect how fans view the legitimacy of the games. Yet his puzzle is not how to bring gambling to heel but how to keep the manna flowing without government intervention or a fan revolt.
Throughout the sports world, the gambling apps have colonized commercial coverage and brought in billions in revenue, engorging the league’s profits and exploding the salaries of top players. In the process, it has created an addiction economy, preying particularly on young men whose brains still lack impulse control. The ubiquitous betting app commercials, which always end with a rapid repetition of the gambling addict hotline, feed the idea that you are limiting your fun by not “getting in the game.” The leagues have engaged in a parasitic practice, targeting the young and vulnerable and leeching their finances dry. Somewhere in the afterlife, wherever he may reside, Pete Rose is very confused.
Silver’s initial arguments for legalization—made publicly on November 13, 2014, in The New York Times—that people were gambling anyway so it might as well be brought into the light and that cheating would be far easier to catch—were convincing at the time but now look farcical. With the gambling-app explosion, anyone can gamble as easily as liking an Instagram post. As for players, the high-stakes gambling that takes place on team planes and in locker rooms has led to some legendary stories, even beyond the many that involve Michael Jordan. In every sport, these are communities of hyper-competitive people with disposable income and a great deal of downtime. The idea that no pro jock would take part in this national sporting bacchanalia is incredibly naïve.
The league, if you read the between the lines, could also be pursuing an extensive attack on players’ speech in order to keep gluttonously feeding at the gambling apps’ troughs of cash. Telling a family member or friend that you aren’t playing that night would amount to a kind of “insider trading” in the eyes of the league, leading to some kind of punishment. Share nothing or risk the “integrity of the game.” This kind of innocuous information is what Terry Rozier, so dragged through the mud by Patel, is accused of sharing. One hopes the union is paying attention, because a serious abridgment of players’ freedom of speech and movement, in order to protect the trough, is coming.
If you watch the sports media covering this story, it morphs into farce. The shows are sponsored by the apps. Sports anchors are now breaking into live coverage to talk betting lines. ESPN even has its own sports book, ESPNBet. Sports journalists are increasingly the new bookies.
Under authoritarianism, shit always flows downhill. Patel’s FBI is on the attack against the NBA, and the league, instead of fighting back, will assuredly go after the players. Anything to protect the true golden goose: sports fans who must remain addicted to gambling.
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