ESPN has reported that the NBA is discussing potential revisions to the wagers available on online sports betting sites.
This all comes in the wake of the Jontay Porter scandal that saw the former Toronto Raptor receive a lifetime ban from the league for manipulating his performance for betting purposes, among other violations with the league’s current gambling policies.
“Since states began legalizing sports betting in 2018, we have worked closely with betting operators as well as integrity monitoring organizations to put in place essential monitoring and reporting systems so that we are best positioned to identify potential betting anomalies and to act to protect the integrity of our game,” an NBA spokesperson told ESPN.
The full scope of the potential changes is still to be determined, but what’s been discussed so far has ranged from minor tweaks to more extreme measures.
Since Porter was on a two-way contract with Toronto, the league may ban betting on players who are on two-way contracts between the G League and the NBA. On the more extreme side of the spectrum, sources said that not allowing bets on the “under” on a player prop has been considered too.
Porter now infamously disclosed confidential information about his health to a betting associate, who proceeded to place an $80,000 wager that he would underperform his prop markets in a March 20 game. Porter then pulled himself out of that game against the Sacramento Kings after allegedly becoming ill.
That $80,000 bet would’ve paid $1.1 million but was frozen and the NBA was alerted to the suspicious activity by the sportsbook operator and watchdog firm US Integrity.
Does The NBA Want To Change Sports Betting?
Legal sports betting has come under fire in recent months. Shohei Ohtani is embroiled in a gambling scandal, many states have moved to ban college player prop bets, and the Porter controversy in the NBA is just the icing on the cake for the industry’s strained public image.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver made some comments when the league handed down Porter’s ban that made our own Geoff Zochodne curious about how he’d use his influence to enact certain changes to how legal bets are placed on his sport.
Silver said in a statement:
“While legal sports betting creates transparency that helps identify suspicious or abnormal activity, this matter also raises important issues about the sufficiency of the regulatory framework currently in place, including the types of bets offered on our games and players. Working closely with all relevant stakeholders across the industry, we will continue to work diligently to safeguard our league and game.”
Zochodne pointed out how Silver’s sentiments are tying into the NBA’s further discussions about changing the betting catalog because, after all, it was a sudden surge in interest in Porter’s props that led to the ban.
According to Zochodne, this raises a big question for the NBA that falls along the lines of:
Do people really need to bet on players like Jontay Porter? (a player on a two-way contract that averaged a minimal 14 minutes a game with just 4.4 points and 3.2 rebounds per night).
The sportsbooks cited in ESPN’s article — BetMGM, FanDuel, and DraftKings — refused to comment on today’s matter, but it would seem that operators will need to start getting ahead of these dilemmas before they happen — whether that’s regarding advertising, betting catalogs, player involvement, or otherwise — in order to avoid further scrapes to the industry’s credibility.
