The NBA hoped to begin its season on a strong note. Now it faces a gambling scandal

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MIAMI (AP) — As a new NBA season opened this week, coach Rick Carlisle and the Indiana Pacers received their annual league-mandated briefing on the do’s and don’ts of gambling.

Betting in casinos is generally allowed. Betting on other sports, provided it is legal, is also allowed.

Betting on NBA basketball is not.

For veterans of the sport, it’s the type of training that can seem routine — almost boring, perhaps. But the potential repercussions for breaking the rules are now abundantly clear after Portland coach Chauncey Billups and Miami guard Terry Rozier were among nearly three dozen people arrested Thursday for what federal law enforcement officials described as their involvement in various illicit gambling activities.

The developments pose an unexpected challenge for a league that hoped to begin its season on a strong note, fueled by an opening night game watched by millions as it went into a thrilling double overtime. There have been amazing performances already: Victor Wembanyama scoring 40 points in his season debut with San Antonio, reigning MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scoring 55 for Oklahoma City, Golden State’s Stephen Curry and Denver’s Aaron Gordon putting on an I-can-top-this show.

Those should be the talk of the league right now. That’s not the case. All that has been overshadowed. The NBA now faces questions about the pervasiveness of gambling in basketball, and uncertainty about what might happen next.

“A shocking day,” said Carlisle, who said he unsuccessfully tried to connect with Billups to offer support. “This is a very serious situation.”

Rozier, who was arrested in Orlando, Florida, where the Heat opened the season against the Magic, stands accused of telling an associate that he was going to play sparingly in a game on March 23, 2023, when he was with the Charlotte Hornets. Rozier played just under 10 minutes and fell well short of many of the lines set for prop bets regarding his performance.

More than $200,000 worth of wagers were won, federal officials said, based on the information Rozier shared.

Billups — a Hall of Fame player — was arrested in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and charged with being involved in a poker scheme that federal officials said cheated victims out of at least $7 million. Billups was one of 31 people arrested on the poker-related charges, and some of those arrested were, according to officials, members of three Mafia families.

The indictments for the insider betting and poker cases were separate, but it appears Billups was mentioned — albeit not by name — in the betting one as well. Someone who matches Billups’ resume, an Oregon resident who played in the NBA from 1997 through 2014 and has been a coach since 2021, was alleged to have given insider information to someone who used it to craft wagers involving Trail Blazers’ games in 2023.

That person is described in that document only as Co-Conspirator 8.

Billups and Rozier appeared in court on Thursday and are out of the league indefinitely, being placed on leave by the NBA just hours after their arrests. An attorney for Billups called his client a “man of integrity” while a lawyer for Rozier said the player is “not a gambler” and “looks forward to winning this fight.”

In a statement, the NBA said it takes “these allegations with the utmost seriousness, and the integrity of our game remains our top priority.”

Yet betting has become big business for the NBA, as it has with virtually all pro sports leagues in this era where sports wagering is legal in much of the country. The practice is allowed in some form in 38 states now. Missouri will join that list later this year, and it’s also permitted in the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

“It’s a world that’s a different world than it was a few years ago with the advent of legalized gambling,” Carlisle noted.

Some leaders in the league encouraged the growth of legalized gambling. In 2014, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver wrote an op-ed in The New York Times noting a “thriving underground business” of illegal sports gambling that “operates free from regulation or oversight.” He called for a “different approach.”

A 2018 Supreme Court decision ultimately cleared the way for the modern era of legalized sports gambling. Today, the NBA has two official gaming partners, FanDuel and DraftKings Sportsbook, and has relationships with at least 12 authorized gaming operators. There is even a portion of the NBA’s website devoted to gambling — NBABet.

As legalized gambling has taken off, Silver has expressed some worries about the implications.

“Obviously, I’m very concerned if there’s any illegal activity going on in our league,” he said in July. “But I’d say similar to the way a public financial market works, the fact that there might be insider trading doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to shut down those public markets. Often the way they are catching insider traders is because they have a system, a complex system, that detects aberrational behavior.”

“But,” he added, “anybody in this league, any player who engages in that activity, there’s no question they are putting their livelihood at risk.”

Golden State coach Steve Kerr said an unfortunate reality for players and coaches in this betting era is that fans reach out — often angrily, sometimes while sitting courtside — to complain that this or that happened and they lost their bet or parlay.

Kerr has even gotten emails from people who want to complain about how they believe he has personally cost them money.

“Our guys get nasty social media posts from people who have bet on games,” Kerr said. “And that’s the thing that I don’t like about this the most. Our players should not have to deal with that, but they do. … It’s just kind of the modern life.”

Boston forward Jaylen Brown, a vice president of the National Basketball Players Association, said Friday that he doesn’t believe players were taken into appropriate consideration when sports gambling became more mainstream.

“We don’t benefit from any of the profits or anything like that, but we’ve got to deal with a lot of the extra negativity and scrutiny behind all the gambling stuff,” Brown said. “On top of that, it creates more integrity issues, etc. So, I’m not sure what the answer is going forward.”

It should be noted that players, through the collective bargaining agreement, do benefit from sponsor agreements the NBA has, including the ones with sportsbook operators like FanDuel and DraftKings.

Billups’ arrest hit home for the Denver Nuggets. Rodney Billups, Chauncey’s brother, is a member of Denver’s coaching staff.

Michael Porter Jr. was with the Nuggets in 2024 when his brother, Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter, was banned for life after a league probe found he disclosed confidential information to sports bettors and wagered on games — sometimes even betting on the Raptors to lose.

There have been other probes since, none quite like what the NBA finds itself dealing with now.

“This is not how we want to start the season in the NBA,” Nuggets coach David Adelman said.

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