NBA insider-information betting accusations are a huge problem for the league
Published 13 days ago • 6 min read
Welcome back to Bucholtz Sports Media. This post is free for everyone thanks to our premium subscribers. You can join them here.
Why the FBI accusations in this NBA gambling scandal matter
Chauncey Billups coaching with the Portland Trail Blazers in November 2021. (Erik Drost on Wikipedia.)
There have been an increasing number of sports gambling scandals over the past few years. That's led to even some blasé reactions at times, especially when some media outlets breathlessly cover everything related to gambling the same way. But there are some sports gambling stories that do particularly matter from a business and media perspective, and Thursday's arrests of current NBA player Terry Rozier, current NBA head coach Chauncey Billups, and former NBA player/coach Damon Jones (as well as 31 others, in response to a FBI-led probe) certainly seem to be a major story. And they're one that should cause some NBA reflection, and some work to prevent anything like this from happening again.
Last March, I went through several key aspects differentiating sports gambling scandals around discussions of Shohei Ohtani's interpreter Ippei Mizuhara being charged for bets he placed with an illegal bookie. Under that classification, some of the allegations so far in this NBA case would make it one of the more significant cases to date (unlike that Ohtani case, which never developed convincing ties to the player himself and was about bets on other sports without inside information that would have been legal in a different state). The key accusations here (at least with regard to these three figures) do seem to revolve around the NBA, and they could cause big problems for the league. Those include claims that Rozier checked himself out of a game to ensure a personal under outcome (which would be deliberate match-fixing) and claims Jones provided insider information on LeBron James not playing. The situation with Billups is more complicated, as what he was actually arrested on was a separate indictment covering 31 people around rigged poker games (certainly problematic activity for a NBA head coach, but not related to the league itself). But he seems to match the description of "Co-Conspirator 8" in the sports betting indictment (which only has six people named as defendants so far: Rozier, Jones, and four bettors), who allegedly provided insider information on who the Portland Trail Blazers (the team Billups was coaching) would be resting on various nights as part of a tanking scheme for draft position. Here are a few quotes on that from the ESPN overview story by David Purdum (linked above, but also here):
Before a March 23, 2023, game against the New Orleans Pelicans, Rozier, who then played for the Hornets, allegedly told [Deniro Laster, one of the four indicted bettors], a childhood friend, that he would remove himself from the game in the first quarter due to a supposed injury, according to the indictment. Laster allegedly sold the information to two bettors for about $100,000.
Those bettors, along with their associates and a network of proxy bettors, used the info to bet on Rozier's unders, according to the indictment. The money wagered was in the hundreds of thousands, according to the indictment. Many of the bets won after Rozier removed himself from the game after nine minutes, with 5 points, 2 assists and 4 rebounds.
Rozier paid for Laster to travel to Philadelphia to collect the proceeds from the scheme, according to the indictment, and then drove to Rozier's home to count the money with him.
...Before a Lakers game against the Milwaukee Bucks on Feb. 9, 2023, Jones texted a coconspirator to "get a big bet on Milwaukee tonight" because the prominent player was out. James did not play in that game, a Lakers loss.
...A defendant referred to as "Co-Conspirator 8" allegedly told a bettor that the Trail Blazers would be tanking and that several of their best players would not be playing in a March 24, 2023, game against the Chicago Bulls. Four regular Portland starters did not play as the Trail Blazers lost by 28.
Co-Conspirator 8 was not named in the indictment but was described in a manner that matches Billups.
It's worth being cautious here on several fronts. These are indictments and arrests, not verdicts; these charges have not yet been proven in court. And while the public claims on this are big, such as FBI director Kash Patel's "Let's not mince words. This is the insider trading saga for the NBA, that's what this is" and U.S. attorney Joseph Nocella Jr.'s "This is one of the most brazen sports corruption schemes since online sports betting became widely legalized in the United States," bold claims aren't always backed up by eventual results.
The previous Mizuhara case is again proof of the need to be careful with these discussions. Many pundits made unsupported claims there about it involving bets on baseball and involving Ohtani himself, and that hasn't been convincingly borne out. And it's worth noting that there's been some strong pushback on these claims, including from Rozier's lawyer Jim Trusty, who said the investigators had previously been in touch with Rozier and said he wasn't a target:
"They characterized Terry as a subject, not a target, but at 6 a.m. this morning they called to tell me FBI agents were trying to arrest him in a hotel. It is unfortunate that instead of allowing him to self surrender they opted for a photo op. They wanted the misplaced glory of embarrassing a professional athlete with a perp walk. That tells you a lot about the motivations in this case. They appear to be taking the word of spectacularly in-credible sources rather than relying on actual evidence of wrongdoing."
There's also a notable statement from a NBPA (players' union) spokesperson pushing back on this:
"The integrity of the game is paramount to NBA players, but so is the presumption of innocence, and both are hindered when player popularity is misused to gain attention. We will ensure our members are protected and afforded their due process rights through this process."
Trusty's point about sources there is well-taken. The lists of people arrested here (especially when including the poker indictment) include a lot of disreputable figures, from illegal gambling ring operators to those with alleged Mafia ties. And large investigations with many targets often run into the issue of some targets untruthfully implicating others in an attempt to gain a lighter sentence for themselves. And there have been quite a few federal investigations of sports that didn't fully justify their initial announcements in terms of the end impacts, including the FBI college basketball probe. And the NBPA spokesperson is correct that attaching these NBA players and coaches to this investigation gets it a lot more popular attention than if it had just focused on the other 31 people indicted.
But it's worth noting that these are specific accusations about particular games. And in the case of Jones, this seems to be further bolstered by a text he sent, which holds extra weight relative to just claims that a person told a subject something. In Rozier's case, the allegation of him paying for a bettor to fly to Philadelphia to retrieve winnings and then driving with him to count money at Rozier's home is highly specific. And in Billups' case, while it's curious that he wasn't one of the six specifically indicted in the betting case, people can be added later, and the description of "co-conspirator 8" there doesn't look good for him (and neither do the allegations of his involvement in this rigged poker saga).
The particularly crucial takeaway here is that regardless of how this eventually shakes out in terms of convictions, the allegations here need to be taken seriously. And they're on another level compared to what we've seen in the past. One of the most significant previous sports betting scandals was also in the NBA with Jontay Porter, and involved some of the same allegations of fixing unders, but Porter was a marginal player on a two-way contract. Rozier is a much more significant veteran who's been in the NBA since 2015, while Billups is a head coach, and while Jones is currently marginal in his own right, his past access to the league's biggest star in James is huge.
We'll see what this eventually leads to for these three figures, but the allegations here seem to suggest that the NBA's past measures to curb outcome-fixing have not been enough to solve the problem. It will be interesting to see if the league announces further bold measures in the wake of this. Regardless, this is certainly an unfortunate damper on their season-opening week.
