US sports leagues rushed to get in on the multi-billion US dollar bonanza of legalized betting, but the arrest of an National Basketball Association (NBA) coach and player in two sprawling US federal investigations show the potential cost of partnering with the gambling industry.
Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, a former Detroit Pistons star and an NBA Hall of Famer, was arrested for his alleged role in rigged illegal poker games that prosecutors say were tied to Mafia crime families.
Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier was charged with manipulating his play for the benefit of bettors and former NBA player and assistant coach Damon Jones was charged in both cases.
Photo: AP
FBI director Kash Patel described “a criminal enterprise that envelopes both the NBA and La Cosa Nostra” and called the scope of the fraud “mind boggling.”
However, for those who have watched US leagues become increasingly entwined with an exploding sports betting industry it is not necessarily surprising.
“Smartphone gambling creates this huge accessibility where any of us can access a gambling app wherever we are within seconds,” said Luke Clark, a psychology professor and director of the Centre for Gambling Research at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
“I study the psychology of gambling games and gambling harm, and I think a lot about the normalization of gambling in sport,” he said.
“We primarily think about that in terms of the fan ... but in this latest story around the NBA arrest, it sort of brings a focus onto the athletes. They’re doing their jobs in an ecosystem that has become saturated with gambling and betting opportunities within quite a short space of time,” he added.
“The teams are partnered with gambling firms, the major leagues are all partnered, players can be sponsored, and the ways that gambling information is woven into sports broadcast in terms of the commentary and the odds updates ... the players and coaches are in quite a kind of exposed position,” he said.
Sports wagering in most US states was illegal until 2018 and professional leagues took care to distance themselves from the thriving operations of illegal bookmakers and offshore betting outfits.
However, seven years ago the US Supreme Court struck down a 1992 federal law that effectively banned commercial sports betting in most states.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver was among those advocating for the change, writing in a New York Times opinion piece in 2014 that he believed sports betting “should be brought out of the
underground and into the sunlight, where it can be appropriately monitored and regulated.”
It is no surprise that Silver, along with officials of other leagues, has moved to claim their piece of the pie.
The American Gaming Association (AGA), which advocates for the industry and tracks the economic impact of commercial gaming, calculates that year-to-date commercial sports betting revenue through August stands at US$10 billion — 18.9 percent higher than the same period last year.
However, for the NBA, the indictments unsealed on Thursday taint what should have been a celebratory season-opening week under a new, 11-year, US$77 billion media rights deal.
Players across the league expressed shock at the arrests of Billups and Rozier, but they also quickly pivoted to the problem of online abuse driven by disappointed bettors.
The prevalence of “prop” bets, in which bettors wager on in-game occurrences such as how many points or assists a player will have — or even such minutiae as whether they would make their first three-point attempt — has changed the way fans interact, even as it offers opportunities to manipulate the system.
“We as players feel it a lot when we step on the court,” Chicago Bulls center Nikola Vucevic said. “Before you used to hear ‘Vuc, get a win.’ Now it’s like ‘Hey, my parlay is 10 rebounds.’”
“Honestly, it pisses me off, because it’s disrespectful to the game,” he said.
Nissan Motor Co has agreed to sell its global headquarters in Yokohama for ￥97 billion (US$630 million) to a group sponsored by Taiwanese autoparts maker Minth Group (敏實集團), as the struggling automaker seeks to shore up its financial position. The acquisition is led by a special purchase company managed by KJR Management Ltd, a Japanese real-estate unit of private equity giant KKR & Co, people familiar with the matter said. KJR said it would act as asset manager together with Mizuho Real Estate Management Co. Nissan is undergoing a broad cost-cutting campaign by eliminating jobs and shuttering plants as it grapples
TEMPORARY TRUCE: China has made concessions to ease rare earth trade controls, among others, while Washington holds fire on a 100% tariff on all Chinese goods China is effectively suspending implementation of additional export controls on rare earth metals and terminating investigations targeting US companies in the semiconductor supply chain, the White House announced. The White House on Saturday issued a fact sheet outlining some details of the trade pact agreed to earlier in the week by US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that aimed to ease tensions between the world’s two largest economies. Under the deal, China is to issue general licenses valid for exports of rare earths, gallium, germanium, antimony and graphite “for the benefit of US end users and their suppliers
Dutch chipmaker Nexperia BV’s China unit yesterday said that it had established sufficient inventories of finished goods and works-in-progress, and that its supply chain remained secure and stable after its parent halted wafer supplies. The Dutch company suspended supplies of wafers to its Chinese assembly plant a week ago, calling it “a direct consequence of the local management’s recent failure to comply with the agreed contractual payment terms,” Reuters reported on Friday last week. Its China unit called Nexperia’s suspension “unilateral” and “extremely irresponsible,” adding that the Dutch parent’s claim about contractual payment was “misleading and highly deceptive,” according to a statement
The Chinese government has issued guidance requiring new data center projects that have received any state funds to only use domestically made artificial intelligence (AI) chips, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. In recent weeks, Chinese regulatory authorities have ordered such data centers that are less than 30 percent complete to remove all installed foreign chips, or cancel plans to purchase them, while projects in a more advanced stage would be decided on a case-by-case basis, the sources said. The move could represent one of China’s most aggressive steps yet to eliminate foreign technology from its critical infrastructure amid a
RSS