Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and former NBA player and assistant coach Damon Jones were arrested by federal law enforcement on Thursday morning on gambling-related charges. There are two separate cases—one for fraudulent sports betting and the other for rigging poker games—and Jones is a defendant in both.
The news has sparked debate over the merits of legalized sports gambling, as well as the NBA’s role in its increasing popularity. In 2014, commissioner Adam Silver wrote an op-ed in The New York Times calling for the legalization and federal regulation of sports betting, back when state-sponsored betting was allowed only in Nevada. Fast forward to 2025 and sports betting is legal in 39 states—or all 50 if counting prediction markets—and the NBA has official betting partnerships with DraftKings and FanDuel.
But gambling isn’t the only eye-catching part of Thursday’s federal indictment in the sports betting case.
It has also put tanking—the practice of encouraging poor on-court results by limiting star player participation to move up in the league’s annual draft order—back in the spotlight. The indictment says that prior to the Trail Blazers’ game on March 24, 2023, an unidentified co-conspirator told defendant Eric Earnest that the Blazers would be “tanking.” (The identity of the co-conspirator, who is described as an NBA player from 1997 to 2014 who has also coached since 2021, seems to line up with Billups, who was charged in the poker case but the not sports betting one.) The report states the co-conspirator told Earnest that Portland’s best players would not be playing before that information was public, and Earnest went on to share in the profits of fraudulent wagers on the game, which Portland lost by 28 points.
Another incident mentioned in the indictment surrounds an Orlando Magic game on April 6, 2023, in which the team chose not to play its entire starting lineup. That information was relayed to a defendant by a Magic player via a co-conspirator. Both games were played in the year leading up to the 2023 NBA Draft, which included generational prospect Victor Wembanyama.
“We take these allegations with the utmost seriousness, and the integrity of our game remains our top priority,” the NBA wrote in a statement.
That NBA teams might intentionally reduce their chances of winning isn’t a grand revelation, but coaches and players generally don’t say the quiet part out loud, and this indictment puts concrete evidence of tanking out in the open.
The NBA has made numerous rule changes in the past decade to disincentivize tanking, including changing the lottery odds in 2019 to reduce the correlation between finishing the season with a worse record and being rewarded with a higher draft pick. The Play-In Tournament, instituted in 2021, also gave struggling teams a better chance to make the playoffs, and the Player Participation Policy in 2023 called for teams to refrain from long-term “shutdowns” of star players.
Last season, the Utah Jazz were fined $100,000 for sitting Lauri Markkanen in violation of the league’s aforementioned policy. Those guidelines, however, were not yet in place during the 2023 season when the Trail Blazers incident occurred. Neither the Blazers nor the Magic were fined for benching healthy players.
That same season, though, the Dallas Mavericks rested their best players for the final two games, despite still being in playoff contention, in order to keep their top-10 protected first-round pick. They used that pick to select Dereck Lively II, who started 42 games the following season for a Dallas team that made the NBA Finals. The franchise was fined $750,000 for “conduct detrimental to the league”—effectively a slap on the wrist that most teams would gladly take in exchange for landing a rotation player for a title-contending roster.
Public criticisms of tanking seem to ebb and flow each year. While backlash of late has arguably not reached what it was in the days of the “Process” Philadelphia 76ers in the 2010s, it remains a dilemma for the NBA.
The betting implications of teams encouraging losing, as highlighted by Thursday’s indictment, adds yet another complication. Teams are supposed to be transparent with the public about who will play and who will not. Sometimes, though, they drop surprises that greatly influence millions of dollars worth of wagers. Evidence of these surprises being the result of alleged criminal operations is not going to help people’s perception of the NBA.
“The worst part of my job is fining and chasing teams and seemingly getting into coaches’ decisions about minutes,” Silver said at a March 2025 press conference. “But we also want to make sure we’re upholding the integrity of the competition as well, so I don’t have an answer sitting here today as to what we’re going to do other than to say that we recognize it’s an issue.”