Fans in Oklahoma City attending the thrilling double-overtime NBA Finals rematch between the Pacers and Thunder on Tuesday stood behind an ad for one of the league's official sports betting partners.
Fans in Oklahoma City attending the thrilling double-overtime NBA Finals rematch between the Pacers and Thunder on Tuesday stood behind an ad for one of the league's official sports betting partners.Darron Cummings/Associated Press
NEW YORK — Sometime around 6 p.m. Friday, the NBA’s official social media channels posted a collection of celebratory pictures with the caption, “Clutch moments, unforgettable debuts, historic performances, WILD ending … Opening week has delivered it all in just 3 days.”
No lie detected, other than a glaring one of omission. Nowhere to be found? Pictures of a Thursday FBI press conference that rocked the league to its very core, new assertions of gambling among league participants leading to high-profile arrests.
This is the cloud the NBA is under now, even as the Knicks and Celtics took to the Madison Square Garden court on that same Friday evening and went through all their usual paces. From pregame warmups through an opening tipoff that broke every Boston heart remembering the playoff series that bounced the Celtics from their attempted title defense last season, from the famous courtside seat dwellers still paying up to $800 per ticket on secondary markets up until game time, it was, by all appearances, business as usual.
Except nothing is normal as this 2025-26 season gets underway, not after the FBI threw that grenade, revealing two separate stings that led to the arrests of a current NBA player, Terry Rozier, and a head coach, Chauncey Billups. The games will go on, but no matter how many game-winners Steph Curry hits, or overtime thrillers the defending champion Thunder win, or 40-point masterpieces Victor Wembanyama records, it won’t feel the same.
Not as the integrity of the game is in question, with questions coming from so many angles. Not just from fans, who watch a missed layup or twisted ankle and wonder if it’s an honest issue for a player or a manufactured reality designed to win a prop bet. And not just for players, who hear jeers from the crowd and wonder if they are the usual rantings of being a visitor on someone else’s home court or if it’s someone looking for them to hit a certain minute count or point total so they can win money.
If sports is one of our most enduring social contracts, moments like these break that trust. And the more they happen, the more that trust erodes. From last year’s permanent NBA suspension of Jontay Porter for his role in manipulating prop bets and game results, to baseball’s Shohei Ohtani, whose interpreter was embroiled in his own lucrative insider trading betting scandal, the drip, drip, drip continues. If it doesn’t stop, will it eventually wash away our belief the games we watch are being played fairly?
“Every American sports fan has a right to look at games now and doubt,” Declan Hill, University of New Haven professor of Investigations at the Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Science and a leading expert on the sports betting industry, wrote in an email exchange. “This does not mean that every play in every sport is corrupt. But it does mean that the essential credibility of the leagues is under serious threat. How will fans know the difference between an honest mistake and a corrupt play?”
Hill, whose PhD from Oxford led him to investigate match fixing in worldwide soccer, has been warning of a day like Thursday.
“There is more — much more — to come. If anyone thinks this kind of behavior is confined to one US sport or league, you are living in a dream world,” he said.
A digital advertisement for the online gambling company FanDuel is displayed in the first half of the Miami Heat's game at the Memphis Grizzlies Friday night.
A digital advertisement for the online gambling company FanDuel is displayed in the first half of the Miami Heat's game at the Memphis Grizzlies Friday night.Brandon Dill/Associated Press
Is the sky really falling? So hard to know. But for those of us of a certain generation, those who grew up believing to our very core that gambling was the third rail of competitive sports, those who remember tales of the Black Sox, of Pete Rose, of Boston College point shaving, or the notorious reputation for betting of a Michael Jordan or Phil Mickelson — and believed them to be cautionary enough that would dissuade others — it sure feels that way. Recent issues may make it less shocking, but no less disappointing, or maddening — for being so directly linked to the incessant, ubiquitous invasion of gambling partnerships with the sports we love.
Remember, it was NBA commissioner Adam Silver who helped open that door, penning in a New York Times op-ed in 2014 that he was in support of legalized sports betting, believing transparency and openness would benefit all. He got his way then but look at him now, forced to reckon with what happens when you let the fox into the henhouse.
Another professor who has studied this topic extensively is George Washington’s Lisa Delpy Neirotti, who was so right when she told me, “There’s so many things that are percolating underground.”
Like these prop bets, which players can feel are easy to manipulate without actually “fixing” a game, but that can also put their well-being in the crosshairs of unsavory gamblers. Or the young athletes out there now harboring dreams toward professional careers, for whom betting on games is already the norm. Or the college game, where the ever-useless NCAA has zero chance of getting a handle on such an unwieldy issue.
“The unspoken driver for much of this alleged fixing is gambling addiction,” Hill said. “Gambling addiction is rife among athletes and virtually no one speaks about it. Everything that makes a young sports person good at their sport — obsession, never giving up, overturning huge disadvantages by massive sweat — makes them terrible gamblers.”
It’s all so disheartening.
“I think in this case most fans will want to believe it’s a one off and not endemic to the league. And as we have seen many times, fans forgive and forget easily as they love the game and don’t want anything to take away from it,” Nierotti said. “As long as these are kind of one-offs. But as more and more they come to the forefront, then I think we’re going to see more impact on the fans’ trust of the sport.”
And the sport’s trust of the fans. If that social contract gets broken, sports will never be the same.
Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at tara.sullivan@globe.com. Follow her @Globe_Tara.