Adam Silver is the commissioner of the NBA. He is also Adam Silver, JD ’88, University of Chicago Law School. And so, being “trained in law,” as the great Howard Cosell would say, Silver would not use the phrase “cardinal sin” lightly.
When Silver met with reporters after the final NBA Board of Governors meeting last week, he was asked specifically about the NBA’s investigation into Toronto Raptors two-way player Jontay Porter on suspicion of gambling on NBA games. A reporter asked Silver what his options were as commissioner for disciplining Porter if the league determined the 24-year-old had indeed bet on NBA games.
“As far as your question about consequences, I have a wide range of disciplinary measures available to me,” Silver said at the news conference. “But this is a cardinal sin that he is accused of in the NBA, and the last extreme option available to me is to ban him from the game. That’s the level of authority I have here because there is nothing more serious, I think, in this league when it comes to gambling and betting on our games, and this is direct player involvement. The investigation is ongoing. , but the consequences could be very serious.
So even though the NBA didn’t use the word “for life” in its announcement Wednesday that it had banned Porter from betting on NBA games and sharing exclusive information with a player, you can be pretty confident about this: Jontay Porter, the younger brother of Denver Nuggets forward Michael Porter Jr., will never play in the league again. This will not be a “normal” multi-year suspension like the one the league imposes on players who violate the terms of its drug program. These players can request reinstatement in two years.
GO FURTHER
Koreen: NBA’s banning of Jontay Porter is about money and perception, not morality
Wear too. But I wouldn’t bet on his return. Think Pete Rose.
The NBA didn’t throw the book at Porter. They threw the whole library at him.
The league’s release Wednesday laid out a devastating case against Porter, detailing how he set up so-called “side bets” involving himself with players so that they would bet “under” – a bet that Porter would not hit a specific stat. number in a game – when Toronto faced the Sacramento Kings on March 20. That night, Porter’s “plus/minus” projected stats for that game were 7.5 points and 5.5 rebounds, numbers above his season averages of 4.4 points and 3.2 rebounds. . . But Porter had played much more in the four games leading up to the March 20 game, including scoring a season-high 14 points in a March 11 game at Portland. So the line wasn’t crazy.
But Porter only played three minutes against Sacramento before withdrawing from the game, saying he felt ill. And that’s how the “unders” struck that night.
The league determined that “another person that Porter associated with and knew was an NBA bettor subsequently placed an $80,000 betting proposition on an online sports betting site, to winning $1.1 million, betting that Porter would underperform in the March 20 game,” according to its release. But due to “unusual” betting activity before Porter’s prop bets for that game were announced, the $80,000 prop bet was “frozen,” the league said, and not paid out .
Additionally, according to the release, from January 2024 to March 2024, Porter placed at least 13 bets on NBA games using an associate’s online betting account.
And, ominously, the NBA’s statement said its findings were, and are, “based on information currently available to league investigators.” The league’s investigation remains open and could lead to new conclusions. The NBA has shared and will continue to share information with federal prosecutors on this matter.
So the league is looking to treat and cut off the suspected antibody circulating in his blood, cauterize the wound and put an end to this situation.
But it is not that simple.
If the NBA believes that Jontay Porter is the only one of its current employees to have bet a dollar or two, or $15, or $22,000, on one of its games, whether for or against that employee’s teams /employee is a whole new level. naive.
This is the world that professional sports – hell, college sports too, and millions of Americans – helped create.
The American Gaming Association reported in February that Americans wagered a record $119.84 billion on legal sports betting in 2023which translates to over $10 billion in revenue for the gaming industry as more states legalize sports betting.
Our national obsession with betting on everything, at all times, on every sporting event, has created an ecosystem awash in a desperate quest for money: money not earned, but earned on a whim, by simply pressing on a betting app. Since the Supreme Court legalized sports betting in the United States in 2018, the sports world has been turned upside down. After decades of treating gambling as a third rail, almost every major American professional sports league has not only made a habit of associating betting on their games, but also encourages it daily, with a cacophony of advertisements during games. matches from the betting partners of each league.
(And here it should be noted, Athleticism also has a business partnership with a gaming entity, BetMGM.)
The line of prop bets to increasingly rude fan behavior at NBA games due to fan betting on games to Jontay Porter – and, worse – is clear, red and throbbing. No one knows where it leads, or where, or if it stops short of disaster – the disaster being someone a little more famous and beloved than Jontay Porter betting up to his neck.
Major League Baseball apparently dodged a huge bullet when a federal investigation determined that super-duper-über star Shohei Ohtani was the victim, rather than the perpetrator, of a gambling scheme carried out by his now former interpreter , who helped himself to $16 million of the Los Angeles Dodgers superstar’s money over the past few years. The NFL was hurt when it suspended then-Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Calvin Ridley for the entire 2022 season for violating the league’s gambling policy by betting on NFL games during the season 2021. He was reinstated in 2023playing last season for the Jacksonville Jaguars, and last month signed a four-year contract worth up to $92 million with the Tennessee Titans.
The NBA got as close as it ever wanted to its own Dante’s Inferno level of fire when it had to investigate Michael Jordan in 1993, after Jordan revealed in court that a check for 57 $000 he wrote to a North Carolina man was not a “loan” to the man to help him build a golf course, as Jordan had initially claimed, but a payment to settle a gambling debt that Jordan subsequently owed him, a second man, who had played golf with Jordan on several occasions, claimed Jordan owed him more than $1 million after losing bets against him during matches. The two settled at $300,000.
The league then concluded that Jordan had not bet on NBA games and had not violated any league rules.
GO FURTHER
As part of the NBA’s investigation process into players for suspicious betting activities
The flames grew closer when former referee Tim Donaghy admitted he would bet on NBA games and insinuated that other referees with similar insights into team trends had done the same. The league fired Donaghy and claimed he was a “rogue” official. An external investigation led by official federal prosecutor Lawrence Pedowitz in 2008 concluded that no other referees had bet on NBA games, although many had gambled outside of their NBA duties. Pedowitz said there was “no evidence” to support Donaghy’s claims that two playoff games — including the infamous Game 6 of the 2002 Western Conference Finals between the Lakers and Kings – had been manipulated by match officials.
In 2020, an ESPN.com investigation detailed how Donaghy benefited from games he officiated and bet on, claiming that he and a gambling associate covered the spread on Donaghy’s games, depending on which team he bet on, between 60 and 70 percent of the time, and that he had bet on dozens of games on a period of four years between 2003 and 2007, when he was arrested. But the Pedowitz report, like Wednesday’s statement, wrapped things up nicely for the league. A guy made a bet. More people. There is no reason to doubt Pedowitz’s veracity. But you also can’t doubt that this is a positive outcome for the league.
And all of these controversies and investigations happened before the new betting landscape in America. What was once transferred to offshore accounts is now done out in the open.
Silver said last week that he wants sports betting to be a regulated industry and that if people want to bet, it’s at least better that they do it in the open rather than in the shadows. Which is certainly a good argument.
But that doesn’t diminish the danger that faces not only professional sports leagues, but every college that fields a team, in any sport. The dam is breaking. And the NBA is not disarming unilaterally. It continues to partner with gambling companies and profit from deals with them. It is of course not illegal to do so. But that takes a lot of steam out of the league’s claims of concern about the game.
And there’s an even bigger bomb. And it works. And it will do far more damage to a league, college, or sport, and probably sooner rather than later, than Jontay Porter’s prop bets.
(Photo by Jontay Porter: Kate Frese/NBAE via Getty Images)