If you haven’t heard by now, this morning the FBI announced arrests on gambling charges. Among the accused: NBA coach Chauncey Billups and former players Terry Rozier and Damon Jones.
There appear to be two different situations. In the first, four Mafia crime families - the Bonnano, Genovese, Gambino and Lucchese - ran allegedly fixed poker games, using athletes to draw other people in. That’s certainly not good, least of all with a current coach indicted. Billups was arrested right after Portland’s loss to Minnesota. Can you imagine being a player and seeing or learning that your coach was arrested right after the game? _(Correction - Billups was arrested Thursday morning)._
Jones and Rozier have been accused of providing “non-public information” to gamblers to help them wager more successfully.
There has always been gambling in the NBA but generally on a much smaller scale, typically involving card games. There have always been stories about that. The deal where Gilbert Arenas and Javaris Crittenton drew guns in the locker room? That was over a gambling debt (Arenas was also arrested in July on charges of running an illegal, high stakes poker ring out of his home).
Christian Laettner and Jerry Stackhouse took the Duke-UNC thing to new heights when they nearly came to blows on an airplane over a card game. Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley are well-known as high-stakes gamblers and allegations of gambling - not proven - dogged Jordan throughout his career, including the suggestion that he was forced to step away from the game after his first threepeat as a quiet suspension.
That was also never proven, but we mention it to underscore that gambling, or at the very least the _perception_ of gambling - has been around the league for a long time. Give a bunch of 20-somethings millions of dollars and ask them to work for 4-6 hours a day and travel constantly, what are they going to do? It’s basically gambling, sex and drinking when you get down to it, and while gambling is professionally idiotic for an athlete, as long as you don’t cheat, it’s not illegal.
This is an absolutely terrible look for the NBA and while it doesn’t directly affect college basketball, there is a gambling mess on the college side too (see below) and it’s about to get worse as the NCAA is going to allow college athletes to gamble on pro sports, starting on November 1st.
On the one hand, what can you do? Same situation, really: young, virile men making great money are going to seek thrills. Big surprise there.
On the other, this is an existential threat to the game, but it’s no surprise. The NBA has fully embraced gambling and college is inching that way.
Everyone involved had better think this through very carefully.