I wasn’t surprised — no one should have been — to hear of the latest NBA betting scandal. Sports and gambling have always been intertwined, but never like today.
Today, professional sports leagues have not only embraced and encouraged legalized gambling, they’ve turned it into a cash cow for the lucky billionaires who own sports teams.
Even college players are now allowed to legally bet on professional sports, although not on college games, as if we can reasonably expect all players to respect that, uh, fine line. I read that the NCAA is now investigating 13 cases.
It all seems so up and up — until it inevitably isn’t.
It rarely is when that kind of money is involved. And the money today dwarfs the bad old days when professional fights were routinely thrown, when the Black Sox threw the World Series, when the Astros banged trash cans, the 1951 shot heard ’round the world may have been helped by a telescope-enhanced sign stealing scheme, when college basketball point-shaving scandals were all the rage, when an NBA referee was found to be betting on NBA games.
There was a time when professional leagues were officially opposed to all kinds of gambling. They were concerned, they would tell you, about the integrity of the game, as if that were a thing. But all bets were off when New Jersey won a court case on legalizing gambling — a case the professional leagues and the NCAA actively opposed — which the Supreme Court confirmed in 2018.
After the ruling came states climbing onto the legalizing gambling bandwagon and then the sports league deluge, with billions of dollars legally passing hands.
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This is not like the era of your weekly office NFL betting pool, which the league used to winkingly ignore. This is official, like it or not, and many bettors, casual or otherwise, seem to like it just fine.
I have nothing against gambling. But I cringe when I see bet365 ads at Ball Arena for Nuggets and Avalanche games. I gamble sometimes myself, and yet, in a way, this full-time open embrace makes me queasy. I can’t really explain it, but it’s there.
Bet365 is, yes, an official betting partner of the Nuggets and Avalanche. Most teams in the NBA have official gambling partners. The NBA has two of its own — FanDuel and DraftKings.
FanDuel is, in fact, also the official betting partner of the NFL. And of Major League Baseball. And of the National Hockey League.
And all the legalized gambling outfits — one report says NBA teams are legally involved with as many as 12 legal betting operations — are in league with your TV screen, which bombards us with gambling ads on the hour (or far more often). They feature shows, once devoted to fantasy leagues, and now ready to advise you on obscure prop bets — like how many times will Jamaal Murray pass with his left to Aaron Gordon on a dunk in the first 9 minutes of the third quarter.
When ESPN’s morning show panel convened on Friday to discuss the scandal, an ad for ESPNBets was scrolling along the bottom of the screen. It’s everywhere.
So, no, I wasn’t surprised.
I was shocked. Not shocked about the gambling but about the biggest name involved in the scandal, Colorado’s own Chauncey Billups — Mr. Big Shot, the King of Park Hill and maybe the most beloved athlete the state has ever produced. He was not only a great basketball player — he was MVP of the league finals one year with Detroit — but also known for giving back to the community.
He was seen as the type of person you’d expect to win the NBA’s Joe Dumars sportsmanship award, which he did as a player for the Nuggets. The award, by the way, goes to the player who “exemplifies the ideals of sportsmanship on the court with ethical behavior, fair play, and integrity.”
We’re advised never to see our heroes up close — like most people, heroes have their own flaws — but you can hardly avoid Billups and his good works, or the giant murals of his image in a city park or in CU’s events center.
And now he has been arrested, charged with luring gamblers to high-stakes rigged poker games. The indictment called him a Face Card, the celebrity face of a game that was run by the mafia. And to be fair, that has nothing to do with legalized sports betting.
But Billups is also an unindicted co-conspirator — co-conspirator No. 8 — in a parallel case. Between the two cases, more than 30 defendants have been charged, including Miami Heat player Terry Rozier.
As co-conspirator, Billups is alleged to have told another defendant in the case that the Trail Blazers team, which he was coaching, would be “tanking” a March 2023 game. Tanking means intentionally losing, which losing teams at the end of a season often try to do to improve their position in the next draft. But knowing teams are tanking and getting inside information about a particular game are very different things.
Say it ain’t so, Chauncey.
And we should all note that it ain’t necessarily so. Being innocent until found guilty in a court of law is an essential piece to what’s left of the struggling U.S. legal system.
The first thing I thought of is that it can’t be true. The FBI’s announcement of the charges was so much performative art, with FBI Director Kash Patel on hand to take in the glory and tell us that this was “an historic arrest across a wide-sweeping criminal enterprise that envelops both the NBA and La Cosa Nostra.”
OK, it sounded like a ’50s movie where the good guys were moving in on the mob. I mean when was the last time you said the words “La Cosa Nostra” in that order? But here’s Patel and company telling us the Bonannos, the Gambinos and other crime families were directly involved in the poker games, not to mention some extralegal knee-breaking if someone failed to pay up.
Look, we know that Donald Trump has it in for sports leagues, who seem tied to the whole DEI culture that Trump wants banned. You saw how Trump reacted when Colin Kaepernick took a knee and when so many athletes later took a knee in support.
But that doesn’t make all that much sense. If Trump were going after professional sports, Chauncey wouldn’t be anyone’s idea of a truly big fish, even though he’s the local team’s coach in war-ravaged Portland. But Billups’ name doesn’t transcend sports, unless it’s heard in Denver or Detroit. Now if it were LeBron … I’d definitely be wondering whether politics played a role, even though the investigation seemed to predate Trump’s second term.
Maybe, I thought, Billups, who is known to have arranged high-stakes poker games, was duped into the rigged games. But when you hear the alleged details of these games, as outlined in the indictment, you have to wonder how Billups could be so naive. Rigged shuffling machines? X-ray poker tables designed to display turned-down cards for off-site cameras? Marked cards that could be spotted with special sunglasses? Drinks that must be stirred and not shaken?
Could he really have been duped in the face of all that? And he is alleged, by the way, to have received a $50,000 check for his participation in one game.
Maybe the mob, as some have suggested, had him in its grips. Did Billups have some secret gambling addiction issue? He made more than $100 million in salary over his 17 years in the NBA. He makes millions now as the Portland coach. It all sounds unlikely, but hardly impossible.
The truth is, I don’t have any idea why Billups would have done what he is accused of doing or how he could have risked so much, including his reputation and his career, on what seems, for him, like chump change.
But I know that on many team planes you have poker games being played in the back rows. Back in the 1970s, when I covered the ABA, I would get into some of those games. I was in way over my head. I made $8,000 in 1970 and couldn’t afford to lose. And still I played, for the thrill of the gamble, for the thrill of playing with professional basketball players, who might have been risking their per diem on a road trip while I was risking the rent money.
I never lost the rent money. If I had, my journalism career could have turned out quite differently. But I was smart enough, or more likely scared enough, to walk away. It’s not a sin to gamble. It’s not even against the law.
But cheating, even in today’s world, is still wrong. And the pain you feel when they say your hero was involved, well, is still very real. And the FBI tells us this bust is just the tip of the iceberg.
”Everyone is in bed with the sports betting companies … we’re all complicit,” prominent NBA analyst Zach Lowe said on his podcast.
He’s right. But it won’t surprise you to learn that his podcast is sponsored by, yes, FanDuel. That’s a prop bet I should have taken.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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Type of Story: Opinion
Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.