The NBA Made a Big Bet on Sports Gambling—and It Just Blew Up
Commissioner Adam Silver had been one of the earliest proponents of legalized betting. Following this week’s arrests, it has led to an existential crisis for his league.
- Federal agents arrested NBA player Terry Rozier and others in an illegal betting scheme, despite a prior NBA investigation finding no violations.
- The probe implicates current and former players and coaches, including Chauncey Billups and Damon Jones, in insider trading and rigged poker games.
- NBA commissioner Adam Silver, an early advocate for legalized sports betting, now faces a crisis highlighting the vulnerabilities of widespread gambling.
When federal agents announced charges against more than 30 people involved in a sprawling gambling probe on Thursday morning, the specifics of the case were gripping.
There were underground poker games, X-ray tables, tips whispered to bettors about where to put their money in upcoming professional basketball games.
But for the NBA, the general picture that emerged—at a Brooklyn press conference across the East River from the league’s Fifth Avenue offices—was much more chilling. Prosecutors unveiled an indictment that featured an active player, a retired one and a current head coach spilling secrets to illegal gamblers.
It was a “fraud,” FBI Director Kash Patel said, “that these perpetrators committed on the grand stage of the NBA.”
It’s also an existential threat to professional sports, and perhaps the defining crisis of Adam Silver’s tenure as NBA commissioner. Silver was an early proponent of legalized sports gambling in the U.S. and had long argued that legal betting would have the positive effect of bringing criminal behavior—such as manipulating and fixing games—into the light.
Still, Thursday’s arrests showed the vulnerability in Silver’s argument. Technology has turned gambling into a widespread habit on a scale too vast for any league to police. Every fan now has a casino in their pocket, and the number of bets per game has grown exponentially, putting sports leagues in the same boat as social-media companies trying to root out inappropriate content.
The sweeping allegations, unveiled across two indictments, touched nearly every corner of the league. Terry Rozier, an active player, was charged with fraud after allegedly telling a friend that he’d be pulling himself out of a game early so the friend could bet on it. Damon Jones, a retired player and former assistant coach, was accused of participating in rigged poker games and passing along confidential team information for illegal wagers.
Chauncey Billups, a Hall of Fame player and now the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, was also charged with participating in illegal poker games backed by organized crime families. But the indictment further suggests that he fed insider information about his team to the betting ring.
The NBA has now placed Billups and Rozier on leave.
“I was deeply disturbed,” Silver said of the allegations while attending Friday’s New York Knicks game. “There’s nothing more important to the league and its fans than the integrity of the competition.”
For any sports league, learning that federal investigators had charged its players and coaches of colluding with gamblers would be a catastrophe. But it is especially stinging in the case of the NBA. Over a decade ago, when sports-betting apps weren’t legally available, Silver was one of the earliest and most influential advocates for legalizing sports gambling.
“Congress should adopt a federal framework that allows states to authorize betting on professional sports,” Silver wrote in a New York Times opinion piece in 2014, “subject to strict regulatory requirements and technological safeguards.”
Since then, every other major league has followed Silver’s lead. Legalized gambling quickly developed into a booming industry and sports books have flooded leagues with money through advertising, product fees and fan engagement.
It is impossible to watch an NFL or MLB game without seeing ads for gambling companies during commercial breaks. In fact, on Thursday, when a panel on ESPN’s flagship morning show discussed the charges, the network scrambled to remove an advertisement for the ESPN Bet sportsbook on the bottom of the screen.
But feeding the growth of sports gambling carried risks like those laid out in this week’s indictments. Though Rozier was investigated by the league after a March 2023 game, the NBA didn’t find any violations of its rules. Rozier played for two more seasons with the Charlotte Hornets and Miami Heat, collecting about $50 million in salary until his arrest. His lawyer says he intends to fight the charges against him.
Billups was charged only over his involvement in rigged poker games, where prosecutors say he was recruited to lure in wealthy players, and pocketed a share of the proceeds. But in the separate sports-betting indictment, prosecutors allege that “Co-Conspirator 8,” an unnamed player-turned-coach whose description and career timeline matches Billups’s exactly, knew that the Trail Blazers intended to rest their best players on March 24, 2023—one day after Rozier left his game with an apparent injury.
The co-conspirator fed that information to bettors, who placed about $100,000 worth of wagers on Portland to lose that night, before the injury details were released to the public and the betting lines moved. They profited when Portland lost by 28 points. Billups’s lawyer has issued a statement denying the accusations against him, and also says he intends to fight them.
Jones, who played alongside LeBron James and later coached him in Cleveland, is also accused of parlaying his privileged position into a betting edge. The former teammates remained close and worked together in an unofficial capacity that gave Jones access to the Los Angeles Lakers, James’s current team. The government says Jones repeatedly tried to sell inside information to another member of the poker-rigging crew.
In February 2023, days after James set the NBA’s all-time scoring record, he had a sore ankle. Before he was listed as “Out” on the injury report, Jones alerted another unnamed co-conspirator. “Get a big bet on Milwaukee tonight before the information is out!”
In all, the sports-betting indictment alleges that participants in the scheme tried to leverage insider information about no fewer than four different NBA players, in addition to Rozier.
Betting crises aren’t unique to the NBA. Baseball has dealt with “spot-fixing,” where a pitcher might throw a single ball on purpose instead of a strike. The NFL has suspended a number of players for betting on games.
But basketball has proven especially susceptible to foul play. It didn’t raise eyebrows when the Blazers willingly benched their best players for a night in the hopes of securing a higher draft pick, a common practice known as “tanking.” And one booming corner of sports betting is prop bets, placed on not the score of the game but a single stat, such as how many rebounds a player might grab. Basketball, a game of constant motion, has many such prop bets to offer—or manipulate.
On Tuesday, the day the NBA season tipped off, Silver himself called for tighter regulations on betting, especially when it comes to the prop bets for lesser players.
“We’ve asked some of our partners to pull back some of the prop bets,” he said on ESPN.
Just two days later, the FBI had arrested one on a $96 million contract, an acquaintance of the league’s most famous current player, and a coach who was already enshrined in basketball’s Hall of Fame.
The night before the FBI’s press conference, Billups had chosen an unfortunate metaphor to describe how he responds to pressure.
“I do the best I can,” Billups said, “and let the chips fall where they may.”