This is not going to be good…
Does the NBA pull an MLB and ban these guys for life, or do they take a wait and see thing?
Either way the NBA has an issue.
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In an earlier case, the NBA banned the player for life.
A coach getting caught up in this is a new thing.
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Sports has an issue. On social media Sunday and Monday there were lots of posts about the Broncos comeback win against the Giants. The number of response comments to them saying, “Vegas made a call after the third quarter,” or similar was stunning. It’s clear now a lot of people think every outcome is rigged, which begs the question why would they bet in the first place. IMO something has to be done Constitutionally to reign things in, which we know won’t happen.
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Don’t know if there are any other Only Murders in the Building fans that have thought this, but isn’t it wild that this whole secret, rigged poker game thing comes out the same time that’s the underlying theme that led to the latest murders in The Arconia?
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Pete Rose calling from The Great Beyond.
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I was not happy when I started seeing FanDuel, Draftkings, et al sponsoring stuff. I’ve mentioned to Mrs CCU that I’m concerned about gambling and sports sponsorship. Getting ESPN involved with betting via the BetESPN thing is another terrible idea.
I’m not against sports betting, just the online portion of it. If you’re gonna bet on sports, make the effort to go find the sports book at a casino.
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With the Jones connection to LeBron, this thing has the potential to make the Black Sox scandal look like kids cheating at tiddly-winks.
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I’m just wondering if they’ll be able to stay out of jail. We can say what we want about Pete Rose, but he didn’t commit a federal crime.
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The current NBA scandal was inevitable. But legal sports betting is also destroying what sports is supposed to be about.
“What’s often less discussed is the social impact of sports betting—and how it’s transformed our interactions with sports,” writes Zac Bissonnette.
On Thursday, the Justice Department announced that they had arrested some 30 people involved in illegal gambling–in particular, sports gambling. It is potentially the biggest sports gambling scandal since the college point-shaving scandal in the early 1950s.
One of those arrested, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, allegedly used inside information to set up fraudulent bets. In 2023, for example, Rozier is accused of letting gamblers know that he would fake an injury and leave a game early, so they could make hundreds of thousands of dollars. And some of that money allegedly wound up in Rozier’s pocket.
For decades, both the NCAA and professional sports leagues kept as far away from gambling as they could, fearing its corrupting potential. Since the widespread legalization of sports gambling after a Supreme Court decision in 2018, numerous lawmakers and sports figures have warned that those fears would turn out to be correct. “I think it will pervade the culture,” said Bill Bradley, the former New Jersey senator and legendary New York Knicks player, in 2024. “I think there will be a scandal.”
When Rob Minnick was a kid in suburban Philadelphia, social events centered around sports. His father was a sportswriter, his grandfather was an umpire and, when men talked, the topic was sports.
When the Phillies won the World Series in 2008, it was a celebratory event for the entire region. He and his friends and family talked excitedly about every game—and he still vividly remembers Ryan Howard’s 58 home-run season in 2006.
When he was 18, Minnick saw his first ad for daily fantasy sports—a predecessor to the sports betting apps that became ubiquitous after a 2018 Supreme Court ruling left the regulation of sports betting up to the states. For Minnick, now 26, it seemed like a way to monetize his obsessive knowledge of sports—and have fun while doing it.
It was the beginning of a spiral. Minnick didn’t want to tell me how much his addiction to sports betting cost him. That’s because when he’s talked about specific losses in the past, he’s seen the numbers used by other gamblers to rationalize their own problems as not being that bad.
What he will say, however, is that he ended up completely broke and in debt six separate times. He took extra jobs so he could start gambling again. It took over his brain: Over time, he memorized the pings and whistles of different bets on different sites.
Gambling addiction has the highest rate of suicide of all addictions and, as the only addiction where the next hit of serotonin might plausibly solve all the problems caused by previous hits, it can also be the hardest to quit.
The risks of problem gambling that have proliferated with the legalization and ubiquitous marketing of sports betting apps have been reported on extensively. Call volumes to gambling addiction hotlines have skyrocketed , and the National Council on Problem Gambling reports that sports bettors develop an addiction at twice the rate of other gamblers.
A recent Maryland study found that 19.8 percent of online sports bettors in the state engage in “disordered gambling”—the kind of gambling, in other words, where someone does it compulsively and damages their life in the process—with another 31 percent at risk. Gambling addiction also has the highest rate of suicide
of all addictions and, as the only addiction where the next hit of serotonin might plausibly solve all the problems caused by previous hits, it can also be the hardest to quit.But what’s been less discussed is the social impact of sports betting—and how it’s transformed our interactions with sports.
When Minnick was a senior at Georgetown, he lived with three guys—and, at first, betting on sports made watching games together even more fun. But as gambling took over his love of sports, it became less social. His friends would have $5 bets on, and he’d extended to a level many times that, and so they just wouldn’t talk about it.
“They’d want to talk about how their favorite quarterback had a high passer rating, and I’m like, I don’t give a ■■■■, because he lost me money,” Minnick said. His interactions with the teams he loved grew more inward and less social, part of a broader retreat from the world. There is a term in addiction literature for this: isolation gambling.
“When you make the shift from team identity to what it’s doing for you, it makes the players more transactional,” Minnick said.
And when it’s not about team identity but about your own bet, it stops being about friends.
Part of what makes contemporary sports betting so socially toxic is the way the bets work now, which is entirely different from the mechanics of how sports betting worked from 776 BCE in Greece until the arrival of the apps.
When Pete Rose bet on the Cincinnati Reds, he bet on them to win, generally to the tune of about $2,000 per game. Rose was an obsessive enough gambler that he sometimes bet parlays—that is, that the Reds would win and so would another team in a different game, but the bets didn’t get more complicated than that.
It might seem weird to use Rose as an example of someone whose gambling didn’t interfere with his life, but he was able to focus on the action enough to manage a game competently, taking the struggling Reds and leading them to winning seasons for four out of his five seasons there.
The outcome would have been different if Rose were managing while gambling today. Rose would still have disgraced himself and betrayed the game, but he also likely would have been isolated from the players he managed.
Part of what makes contemporary sports betting so socially toxic is the way the bets work now, which is entirely different from the mechanics of how sports betting worked from 776 BCE in Greece until the arrival of the apps.
Today, a compulsive gambler watching (and managing) a baseball team would have bets going on a slew of games, and he’d be changing those bets and making new ones throughout the action. On many sports betting apps, a maze of bizarre options—sometimes called micro bets—are available while you watch. It’s now possible to bet on whether the next pitch will be a ball or a strike. These are the most profitable bets for the apps, and they’re promoted heavily.
Isaac Rose-Berman, a professional sports bettor and a fellow specializing in gambling policy at the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me that the dividing line for betting as an impediment to sports as a social function is simple: “If you place a bet and then turn off the phone, I think that’s good. If you place a bet and keep your app open and keep placing more bets, that’s bad.”
Gambling, Rose-Berman says, used to be man versus vice. Now it’s “man versus billions in technology.”
Technological advances in gambling apps have turned a form of betting built around pregame point spreads into something much more like a slot machine: faster-paced, more random, and relentlessly engaging.
Rose-Berman points to the star-studded television commercials for sports betting companies—ubiquitous even for fans who’ve never gambled. In those ads, you’ll generally see people watching sports on a TV with their phone in their hand, a second screen having replaced the people men used to watch sports with.
And even though sports are booming—with team valuations at all-time highs and record-breaking TV contracts—their social role has diminished, and it’s diminished most among young people. According to one study, “Nearly 75 percent of sports viewers said they typically watched with others in 2011–12. That fell to 61 percent in 2023–24. The greatest declines have been with fans aged 18 to 34, falling from 86 percent in 2011–12 to 63 percent in 2023–24.”
So much has been written about the epidemic of male loneliness. Young men have fewer friends than ever and hanging out is in structural decline. “Sports are good,” Rose-Berman said. “Socially, psychologically—watching sports is good for people.”
But the rise of in-game betting is incompatible with the social role that sports have always played—and that they need to play right now, desperately, to help offset a crisis of isolation.
These days, Minnick, who hasn’t gambled in years, makes TikTok videos about sports betting addiction—interviewing gamblers and warning about the dangers of the addictive technology behind the apps. I asked him whether spending so much time in the world of sports betting makes it hard to abstain from gambling again.
“It’s like if an alcoholic went to New Orleans and spent the whole time watching someone throw up in sewers,” he said. “And then you asked them if they wanted to get a bourbon? No, I’m good.”
A couple years ago, he went to an Eagles versus 49ers game, and hung out at the tailgate, asking people if they were betting on the game. Everyone was drunk, which made landing interviews easy. The young people had bets on, consistent with survey data showing sports betting participation plummets as people get older. They eagerly showed him their apps and bragged about how much money they were going to make.
But when he asked guys over 50 whether they were betting, they were puzzled by the question. Of course they weren’t betting, they said. It would ruin the experience of watching the game with their friends.
Even hammered, the older guys knew that.
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This makes the point that needs to be made.
Honestly it won’t be long until we view these competitions the same way as the WWE.
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Irony is dead.
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