OPINION:
So who will be the NBA’s Judge Landis?
Without the racism, of course.
In the wake of the federal game-fixing and other charges involving a former NBA player Damon Jones, current Miami Heat star Terry Rozier and a Hall of Famer and Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, who will be the figure that drops a hammer that resonates throughout the sport for a century?
Billups, Rozier and Jones were named in indictments unsealed Thursday in New York. They were among 31 people, including alleged mobsters, charged in the gambling scandal. Rozier and Jones were accused of using private information about players to win bets on NBA games, among other charges.
Billups was charged with participating in a conspiracy to fix high-stakes card games tied to the Mafia, allegedly cheating gamblers out of at least $7 million, according to authorities. But an unidentified co-conspirator in the Rozier indictment matches the description of Billups — telling another man that Portland planned to intentionally lose a 2023 game against the Chicago Bulls. They bet $100,000 that the Trail Blazers would lose, which they did.
They appear to have operated with little fear of consequence, and any game wagering may have been done through illegal bookies. But the stain this scandal leaves on the NBA will be immune to any distinction between legal and illegal sports betting. The NBA, for all intents and purposes, is in the gambling business.
Remember how Commissioner Adam Silver’s high priest of sports betting — Wizards owner Ted Leonsis — celebrated bringing the first sports book into a sports arena?
“We’ll look back at it one day,” he told the Athletic in 2019, “And, I think, kind of laugh to say, ‘Jeez, remember when we would think of sports betting as, like, the movie ’Casino’ and people smoking cigarettes and being up all night?’ That’s not what this is going to be.”
Hilarious.
Basketball will need a leader willing to make fixing games so abhorrent that it it becomes an engrained part of the culture — like what happened in baseball in 1919, when then Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned eight members of the Chicago White Sox accused of throwing games in the 1919 World Series in a deal they allegedly made with organized crime?
It didn’t matter if they were found not guilty in a court of law. It didn’t matter that some players may not have been involved in the fix. Prominent star players — including one of the game’s greatest hitters, Shoeless Joe Jackson — were banned from baseball for life.
Keeping baseball pure became a deeply embedded part of not just the game, but the way the country sees the game.
Books and plays have been written on the topic. Operas composed. Movies made.
Betting on baseball has become the mortal sin of the game for its players. You can snort cocaine, beat your wife or inject yourself with an illegal substance made from the pituitary glands of iguanas and still have a job.
But bet on baseball in a game that “this person has a duty to perform results” means banishment from the diamond, according to the rule prohibiting betting.
So what will it take to impact the culture of basketball — perhaps the most susceptible of all sports to fixing outcomes? Especially now, when the challenge is greater than a century ago because betting on sports is now legal.
Not just legal, but encouraged, promoted and endorsed by the very figures in charge of the integrity of their sport.
It can’t be Silver. The NBA commissioner was the one who rolled out the red carpet for legalized sports betting in his famous 2014 New York Times Op-Ed article in which he argued that “Congress should adopt a federal framework that allows states to authorize betting on professional sports, subject to strict regulatory requirements and technological safeguards.”
He was Rick, inviting you to the Café American in Casablanca.
“My initial reaction was I was deeply disturbed,” Silver told Amazon Prime during a Friday night game between the Boston Celtics and New York Knicks.
If he had a sense of humor, he would have responded, “I’m shocked — shocked — to find that gambling is going on in here!” But there is nothing funny about this.
“There’s nothing more important to the league and its fans than the integrity of the competition, so I had a pit in my stomach,” Silver said.
Now, it is entirely plausible that these indictments fall apart like a Wizards defense. This is not your father’s Justice Department. Some of the lawyers involved may have gotten their degrees at the Trinidad School of Law and Culinary Arts.
But the damage may already be done.
The NBA’s integrity always hangs by a thread. Fans believe the draft lottery is fixed. Even players think the league is crooked.
Former NBA star Rasheed Wallace said in an interview two years ago that referees conspired to fix games by using secret emails. If this goes away, there will be those who believe the league powers squashed it.
They will have good reason to believe that.
Long time Las Vegas bookmaker Art Manteris, who was the league’s gambling consultant from 1998 to 2007, investigated the 2007 betting scandal involving former referee Tim Donaghy, who pleaded guilty to felony charges for taking cash payoffs from gamblers and betting on games he officiated in.
According to a book coming out in January by Manteris called “The Bookie” (Dey Street Books), they found evidence that Donaghy had intentionally fixed games.
But when the league report came out, it said “the government found no evidence that Donaghy ever intentionally made a particular ruling during a game in order to increase the likelihood that his gambling pick would be correct.
“So either the NBA never told the FBI about … findings that Donaghy intentionally fixed over two dozen games, or they were all complicit in sweeping … findings under the rug. Whatever the case, those findings were inexplicably omitted. The league had damaging evidence … and never released it.”
That won’t work this time, and the league may need someone wielding a Judge Landis-like gavel to save it.
Catch Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast.