No Pearl Clutching, Please.

The NBA is in bed with gambling. This stuff'll happen

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The NBA on Wednesday banned a guy for life for being in bed with gamblers, although the circumstances surrounding his violations were somewhat confusing.

After all, he was using the league’s preferred vendor.

True story. This player, Jontay Porter, of whom you may not have heard because he’s a two-way player for Toronto (alternating between the NBA and its minor league), got the lifetime heave-ho for being crooked. According to a league statement, Porter disclosed confidential info to bettors, “limited his own participation in one or more games for betting purposes,” and — spoiler alert — bet on NBA games himself.

Worse, or perhaps I should say maybe worse, Porter bet on the Raptors to lose.

So — yeah. Not great, Bob.

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Interested to know more, I quickly tabbed over to the NBA’s own web site. Alas, I could find no Porter-banned-for-life headline, at least not immediately.

But I did locate this cool link to NBABet, the gambling service that is helpfully set up for NBA.com visitors who’d like to peruse the league’s site for info and then immediately crank up a couple of parlays. NBABet, a league-sanctioned gambling operation, is set up in official partnership with FanDuel.

It turns out that Jontay Porter was using FanDuel, too. According to the gambling news site Action Network, Porter had a VIP FanDuel account set up in Colorado through which he funneled millions of dollars in bets from 2021 to 2023.

The site’s report indicated that Jontay Porter’s own bets were not directed at the NBA, which might strain credulity considering that his brother, Michael Porter Jr., plays for the league champion Denver Nuggets in that state. But at this point it doesn’t matter, since the league has the goods on Jontay and feels righteous enough to ban him for gambling on a league that openly invites everybody else to gamble, as long as the owners get their cut of your losses.

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Let’s not pretend this won’t happen again. It will happen again. The guy won’t be named Jontay, I suppose, and he may not be a player. He might be a referee or a team trainer or a VP of communications or a clock operator — and I say that not to besmirch anyone in those fields, but to shine a light on how comically easy it could be to affect the outcome of a pro sports game.

What’s needed? Not much, actually: a willing accomplice, no moral grounding, and a league that has opened the door to above-the-table betting activity such that it might not be so easy to decipher legal from illegal (or at least against the rules) betting behavior.

One of the chilling details in the Jontay Porter story is that he simply faked his own illness at least once, taking himself out of a game in hopes of shading its outcome. In that case, Porter’s behavior was so obvious that it got red-flagged, and a prop bet on that game got taken down.

But don’t you ever wonder what’s going on when an NBA team sits a key and clearly healthy player on, say, a random Wednesday? I can assure you, the league itself wonders. That’s why it instituted a rule this season mandating that teams can voluntarily sit no more than one otherwise healthy “star” player — that is, All-Star or All-NBA caliber — per game.

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The idea isn’t just to produce more star power per game. It’s to reassure a betting public. And that is the very essence of the tail wagging the dog.

In most respects, the NBA lucked out on this one. Jontay Porter proved to be exactly clumsy enough to be trackable, and once tracked he was caught, and now he can’t play in the league anymore. That will satisfy those who’d love to believe that Porter is the one bad apple.

For the rest of us, the episode serves as a reminder that pro sports for most of their existence considered their relationship with betting to be fraught, and did their best to completely sever themselves from it. Lately? Not so much. And once entwined, it’s honestly unrealistic to think the legal lines won’t get blurred.

The league wanted its cut of the betting profits, in the end. This is what it got. But sure, the checks will cash.