The NBA has put its sneaker foot down on players’ sports betting. The league has banned Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter for life after he shared confidential information with bettors and limited his playing time to satisfy certain bets, it said in an announcement Wednesday. It’s the first time in 70 years the league has banned a player for gambling.
“There is nothing more important than protecting the integrity of NBA competition for our fans, our teams and everyone associated with our sport, which is why Jontay’s blatant violations of our playing rules Porter are punished with the most severe punishment,” NBA Commissioner Adam said. Silver said in the release.
Silver called player betting a “cardinal sin” in the sport. League rules say no NBA employees, including players, coaches and referees, can bet on NBA games. In March, Minnesota Timberwolves player Rudy Gobert was fined $100,000 for making a money gesture toward a referee, implying that the referee had influenced the outcome of a game because of bettors. According to the NBA’s 2023 collective bargaining agreement, players are required to attend at least one anti-gambling training session.
The NBA says it opened an investigation into Porter in late March, days after a March 20 game in which Porter claimed illness to limit his playing time to three minutes, affecting the results of bets placed on him he. The investigation found that Porter told people he knew were NBA bettors about his health. A bettor then placed an $80,000 bet that would result in a payout of $1.1 million if Porter underperformed in the game.
In the previous months, Porter had placed a total of 13 bets on games ranging from $15 to $22,000, according to the NBA, although none of the bets were for games in which Porter had participated, according to the announcement.
The NBA did not respond Fortunerequest for comment. Attempts to contact Porter through a representative were unsuccessful.
A new era of sports betting
The floodgates to American sports betting opened in 2018, after the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban implemented in 1992. Before the ruling, Americans spent about $150 billion on illegal bets on sporting events each year.
Experts predicted that the legalization of sports betting would lead to a proliferation of gambling opportunities, not only changing the financial landscape of sports by redirecting money spent on illegal wagering into broadcast deals and partnerships, but also changing fans’ relationship with American sports.
“Fans will focus much more on gambling than following a team,” said Tulane Law School professor Gabriel Feldman New York Times. “It will make every second of every game of every week interesting for fans as it will give everyone something to cheer for.”
Indeed, legalizing sports betting had the desired impact: A record 68 million Americans placed a bet during this year’s NCAA March Madness, spending $2.72 billion. But the illegal sports betting market attracted an even larger audience and $4.3 billion in bets.
The popularity of sports betting also coincides with an increase in team personnel getting into trouble due to gambling. Los Angeles Dodgers sensation Shohei Ohtani’s longtime translator is charged with federal bank fraud and gambling debt crimes, including stealing $16 million from the baseball star. MLB has a multi-year partnership with online gaming platform FanDuel Group.
The NBA is not exempt from the lure of the growing sports betting market: It has deals with sports betting platforms DraftKings, FanDuel and BetMGM. In February, LeBron James and DraftKings announced a partnership, with James serving as a “talent ambassador” on a multi-year deal.
The ghost of sports gambling of the past
Sports betting seems like a new problem for basketball, but it’s also a reprise of a pervasive problem the sport faced in the mid-20th century.
In 1950, the City College of New York won the NCAA and National Invitation Tournament, an unprecedented streak. But CCNY, as well as seven other schools, were involved in a scandal that saw 86 match fixings between 1947 and 1950. Over 30 students were found to be involved.
The sport has failed to shake the controversy. A decade later, college basketball was rocked by another game-fixing scandal, this time with 37 students and 32 schools implicated. At the center of the scandal was Jack Molinas, who played 29 games with the NBA’s Fort Wayne Pistons and was banned from the NBA in 1954 for betting on his own games. In 1962, he was accused of being the ringleader of the 1961 scam, colluding with mobsters and bribing players to rig the games. He has used point-cutting, a practice of changing the score of a game without changing the outcome, to help create profitable outcomes for bettors. Molinas served five years in prison and was killed in 1975 in his New York home.
But spot shaving practices continued into the following decades. Boston College player Rick Kuhn conspired with mobsters to reduce points in games in 1978 and 1979. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, with the judge who sentenced him saying the sentence should serve as a warning to future basketball stars.
“A strong argument can be made,” said U.S. District Judge Henry Bramwell, “that substantial prison time imposed on this defendant will be recalled in the future by another college athlete who may be tempted to impair his performance.”