Quick thoughts on the NBA gambling indictments

This morning, in a political stunt meant to distract the sports-watching world from Egor Dëmin going 4 of 6 from deep in his NBA debut, Kash Patel’s FBI arrested Terry Rozier, Chauncey Billups, and a host of alleged co-conspirators in connection with two now-unsealed federal indictments detailing gambling schemes of varying levels of sophistication. The arrests have understandably been received as a sort of first domino in the long-awaited NBA gambling scandal that anybody with critical faculties could have predicted around the time that legalized sportsbooks began to sponsor and partner with every facet of the league’s production and coverage. That read—the NBA’s FanDuel partnerships chickens are coming home to roost!—is both tempting and not fully incorrect. If it was up to me, the scandal du jour would be the FBI arresting Adam Silver for his role in sending Cooper Flagg, Dylan Harper, and VJ Edgecombe to Dallas, San Antonio, and Philadelphia, a rare hypothetical arrest that I’d betray my anticarceral commitments to applaud. Still, the details are worth parsing.

Did Terry Rozier throw games because the (still alive?) Italian mob had his loved ones held at gunpoint?

Short answer: no.

Mid-length answer: it’s important, in talking about this emerging scandal, to treat the two indictments in turn. As a bit of housekeeping, it bears noting that everything to be discussed below is an allegation being made by federal prosecutors—afford them as much weight as you believe they’re worth—but repeatedly using the word “allegedly” unfortunately carries slimy connotations. And so: the dual indictments detail two separate and distinct gambling schemes that implicate the NBA-as-league in separate and distinct ways. The more eye-popping one, both in terms of narrative complexity and sheer money purportedly involved, sounds like what the Safdie Brothers would come up with if you tasked them with settling their creative differences and penning a script that imagined Jeffery Epstein as an Italian dude rather than any old pervert. In short: a bunch of NY mob families organized a series of rigged, high-stakes poker games that in part employed big names like former NBA star and current(?) NBA coach Chauncey Billups as both draws to the table and willing participants in the scam. You come to gamble and ask Chauncey Billups what it was like playing with Melo, you leave with your wallet empty, and eventually you get enough good sense to call the feds. This indictment only involves the NBA insofar as Billups is an NBA legend and coach—otherwise, its bearing upon the operations of the league is not dissimilar to learning that, say, Nikola Jokic has been redirecting ketamine ostensibly labeled for his horses to fuel whatever can be said to constitute Denver’s nightlife.

The second indictment, which all-but-names Billups but does not in face charge him with criminal wrongdoing, details what could largely be understood as a scheme of insider trading on NBA betting with the implication of some point-shaving looming in the shadows. Here, the feds allege that Scary Terry and a number of hanger-ons traded in then-private information—a team tanking here, a player genuinely unavailable here, a player purporting to be unavailable there—to establish an edge on betting markets and make a quick penny (hundreds of thousands of dollars, as opposed to the rigged poker’s $7 million). A funny detail in the indictment is that this info was not always good. For instance, the dudes got a tip ahead of the January 15, 2024 Lakers-Thunder game that LeBron was going to be ruled out due to injury, but then he played, scored 25, beat the Thunder, and lost everyone some money. The gut read here is that we’re not dealing with allegations of full-blown rigging (these were locks in the colloquial sense rather than the literal), but rather of backrooms horse-trading that disadvantaged the sportsbooks offering imperfect lines rather than the league itself. Of course, there are exceptions to this read—which, below—but one particularly cute detail from the indictment is that one of Rozier’s friends consistently bet Rozier’s over point total, which as far as I’m concerned is a wholesome if financially risky way to tell your friend you love him. If one of my friends was in the NBA, I’m sure I’d bet his over all the time—above board in my book.

Point being, these two indictments have next to nothing to do with one another. Though one of the allegations in the sports-gambling indictments is that Chauncey Billups shared inside info on the Blazers tanking a game (again, more below), Billups is crucially not charged as of now in the NBA conspiracy. Seeing as we can safely assume Billups has not promised testimony in exchange for immunity (the dude just got arrested on a separate charge), the best bet as to why Billups has not been charged in the NBA scheme is that the feds could not prove up knowing involvement in any sort of conspiracy. That being said, there’s a reason that everyone is discussing the two indictments as if they constitute one headline. It does not feel particularly bold to suggest that the FBI made their arrests on these two separate and distinct schemes on the same day to link a potentially mundane scheme with a more eye-popping one. Patel and the feds have their NBA scandal, and it would be unwise to discount their deep cynicism. It doesn’t seem accidental that arms of the US government intentionally made a move to humiliate and tar the majority-Black, ostensibly woke professional sports league, is the main point here.

Did Sean Marks wager his salary on the Nets under? Or: is the NBA cooked?

Just because the Rozier scheme is not as scandalous as the FBI’s coordinated humiliation ritual was meant to make it appear does not mean that it’s not, in its own right, deeply scandalous. Among the allegations of insider information trading are some thornier implications, including one incident in which Rozier purportedly pulled himself from a game early in order to lock in his points under and, again, make his friends a quick buck. If true, this would not be the first time in recent memory that such a scheme took place; as the indictment notes, Johntay Porter got caught doing something similar last year (as an aside, the Porter brothers might properly be understood as the Ball family’s Wario and Waluigi). From where I stand, it’s one thing if gamblers learn early that a player will be sitting, as the only loser is an unsuspecting sportsbook; it’s another thing entirely if players are actively choosing not to compete so as to fulfill some backroom gambling scheme. What I’d say, from relatively unprivileged vantage point, is that these are the sorts of issues that legalized gambling made possible, and that in the short term this sort of scheme coming to light is going to turn basically every NBA fan schizophrenic. As Michael Porter Jr. detailed on, sigh, a podcast appearance this summer, legalized sports gambling created a remarkably easy (albeit, obviously, illegal) loophole for players, specifically those on the league’s periphery, to make their friends some quick money. Legalized sportsbetting has brought with it an overwhelming proliferation of the sorts of bets offered: your college bookie didn’t own a gun, but he would have found one if you tried to bet $10k, or even $10, on a Johntay Porter points prop. When every player is, in essence, a live market, it’s extremely easy for them to occasionally rig said market. This sort of thing is probably not happening often—again, these guys seem to have gotten caught—but I’d venture to guess that more than just Rozier, Porter, and Malik Beasley have at some point fucked with their on-court performance in the name of off-court payouts.

The elephant here is that legalized gambling has done more than just grease the wheels for this sort of thing happening. The NBA, outside of the Clippers and Warriors, is comprised of young men, a demographic that has been bombarded with gambling advertisements as comprehensively as it has with pornography, and it would make intuitive sense that more than a few of these young men have heard some intrusive thoughts accordingly. From where I stand, it’s no big deal as an NBA fan if Danny Wolf’s Michigan boys find out that Cam Thomas is hurt before DraftKings does (again, it’s a crime, but not all crimes are immoral), but it’s another thing entirely if someone’s chucking shots off the backboard to win their buddy a semester of tuition money.

There’s a sort of ouroboros here: prop gambling has turned NBA viewers insane and antisocial, which insanity and antisocial behavior will now be amplified by a real life prop betting scandal. This season, every player miscue and baffling coaching decision will be read, at some level, as a cynical ploy to make someone some money. It’s a bad thing, and will to an unknowable degree shake peoples’ confidence in the NBA as an institution and on-court product, which is a shame for someone who loves watching the NBA. The most interesting thing here though is that a lot of what’s alleged in the indictment speaks to problems of non-competitiveness already endemic to the NBA. In scrolling through the Rozier indictment, you may notice that a great deal of the supposed illegal activity took place in what is colloquially known as Mickey Mouse March and Anything Goes April. This squares with any sentient fan’s understanding of the NBA: March, insofar as it hosts late-season NBA action, is when the wheels come off. Bad teams throw in the towel in favor of securing a draft pick (because, of course, that’s how leagues go. The worst teams get the best picks so that they can extricate themselves from a cycle of misery and keep fans engaged. Surely, no rational league would allow the best teams to, year after year, secure the best talent on the most affordable contracts, right? Such a system would be absurd!), frustrated players choose to sacrifice their bodies less for lost causes, and contending teams rest players so as to keep their legs fresh for the grueling playoff run to come. For everybody except Ball Don’t Stop and the few teams still jostling for playoff seeding position, March is a joke.

This—the problem of sustaining competitiveness across a league that either disincentivizes or renders impossible genuine competition for a good deal of its teams—is something with which the NBA has long-grappled, and which has next to nothing to do with gambling. It’s in this light through which we can parse the connective tissue between the two indictments: the allegation that Chauncey Billups advised somebody that the Portland Trail Blazers would be sitting their best players ahead of a March 24, 2023 game against the Chicago Bulls. Buddy, the Blazers were 32-40, noncompetitive team that had just accidentally interrupted a six-game losing streak with a win against the Utah Jazz; I could have told you they would sit their best players. Winning would accomplish nothing; losing got them one percentage point closer to Victor Wembanyama.