For decades, professional sports leagues created firewalls to protect the integrity of their games from the corrosive nature of gambling. Starting several years ago, the leagues started linking arms with bettors and gambling platforms. especially on line. The money began rolling in to their coffers, but at what cost?
The NBA may be discovering it this morning. Feds arrested the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers and the Miami Heat’s point guard in unrelated investigations into gambling and corruption. And it may not end with these two, either:
Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups have been arrested in connection with a federal investigation into sports betting, people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Thursday.
The exact charge or charges they face were not immediately known. Two people spoke to the AP about Rozier on condition of anonymity because they couldn’t discuss details of the investigation publicly. One of these people also told the AP of Billups’ arrest. …
The case was brought by the same U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn that previously prosecuted ex-NBA player Jontay Porter. The former Toronto Raptors center pleaded guilty to charges that he withdrew early from games, claiming illness or injury, so that those in the know could win big by betting on him to underperform expectations.
The Rozier case first came to the attention of investigators after complaints from bettors on online sportsbooks, who smelled a rat:
Posts still online from March 23, 2023 show that some bettors were furious with sportsbooks that evening when it became evident that Rozier was not going to return to the Charlotte-New Orleans game after the first quarter, with many turning to social media to say that something “shady” had gone on regarding the prop bets involving his stats for that night.
What does that have to do with Billups? Nothing directly. ABC reports that Billups got caught up in another probe into Mafia-related poker games:
Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups has been charged in an illegal poker operation tied to the Mafia, law enforcement sources told ABC News.
Billups, in his fifth season as head coach, was arrested in Oregon, where is expected to make an initial court appearance on Thursday, sources said.
The FBI will hold a presser later today to release more information about both arrests, and presumably, about the nature of their investigation. If it took the FBI and Department of Justice two years to finally arrest Rozier, one has to imagine that they have been taking a long and close look at the entire league and their connection to gambling-related corruption.
The NBA, and the other professional leagues, have played with fire for years. The ur-text of the previous firewall between gambling and professional sports was the Black Sox Scandal in the 1919 World Series, where players threw games and the series in a convoluted series of connections and double-crosses with gamblers. Major League Baseball drew a thick red line between players, coaches, and gambling — and then ruthlessly enforced it, starting with ex post facto lifetime bans against the eight Black Sox players all the way through Pete Rose. The NFL repeatedly sidelined players for connections to casinos and gamblers. The NBA has been less successful, as the 2007 scandal with referee Tim Donaghy showed, in which he bet on games he officiated and skewed the results with his calls.
Rather than strengthen the firewalls, however, the leagues all climbed into bed with the gamblers to get the advertising money and promotional benefits. Should it come as any surprise that the newfound proximity to players and coaches resulted in more corruption of the games themselves? Everyone involved made greed their top priority rather than the integrity of the game, and that message understandably spread to the entire structure of professional sports.
The result may well be that everyone will make more money in the short run. In the longer run, though, angry fans will question every injury, every substitution, and every missed score and wonder whether to chalk it up to human frailty on the field or human frailty of the pocketbook. Get ready for a lot more of these stories, because now that the league has married gamblers, they can’t exactly bar marital relations between them.
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