By Jaime Suarez Del Valle
Boston University News Service
The NBA season is back, featuring exciting performances on the court and drama off the court with the arrests of multiple players and a coach. Kash Patel, Director of the FBI, announced on Oct. 23 that the agency made several arrests involving an investigation into illegal sports gambling and rigged poker games connected to organized crime families.
Now, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver needs to restore the league’s credibility, which is declining in an era where sports and gambling are more intertwined than ever before.
“All of the professional leagues that are supportive of sports gambling, all have to be terrified that this will happen to their league,” said Michael Holley, a sports reporter and Boston University professor.
Adam Silver saw several players, including Terry Rozier and Damon Jones, and Portland Trailblazers head coach Chauncey Billups among 31 defendants arrested. Silver was the lone major sports league commissioner in support of legalized sports betting.
Around the time Silver took over the NBA from his predecessor, David Stern, in 2014, he published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he argued that legalization and regulation can bring sports betting “out of the underground and into the sunlight.” Fast forward to 2025, and the league’s reputation is threatened by a federal investigation that continues its focus on the NBA. League officials met with a congressional committee in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 5.
Today, sports gambling is everywhere. Most states and territories have legalized sports betting in some fashion. Companies like FanDuel and DraftKings have lucrative partnerships with both major sports leagues and broadcasters, and said broadcasters flood their coverage with betting ads and betting-centered rhetoric.
A major aspect of the legalized sports betting market is proposition bets. These proposition bets promote wagers on small and individual occurrences in games rather than the overall outcome, lending themselves to a more interactive and volatile experience. It draws in a lot of revenue for both the leagues and the sportsbooks, but it also taps into the gambling addiction of so many Americans. While these ads are accompanied by a gambling addiction disclaimer and hotline, the warnings clash with the companies’ main goal: to get the sports viewer to gamble.
“You can’t have both,” Holley said. “The people who you’re speaking to about gambling are not the people who will call the hotline and say ‘I’ve got a problem’, and they’re not gonna be the people gambling responsibly.”
Sports betting is not all doom and gloom, though. Alongside fantasy leagues, a game in which participants draft their own rosters and acquire points based on each individual’s performance, it draws audience engagement to the product year-round. Viewers with fantasy teams or parlays pay closer attention to the leagues during both the regular season and the offseason to act as a general manager of a franchise.
However, much of the current NBA model lends itself to gambling activity, with organizations tanking to boost their NBA lottery odds while resting healthy players — an occurrence that goes unpunished by the league. Holley mentioned two examples: the 2022-2023 Dallas Mavericks, who benched a healthy Luka Doncic around the end of the season, and the 2021-2022 Oklahoma City Thunder, who shut down a healthy Al Horford after the trade deadline en route to missing the playoffs for the second consecutive season. Even if the league fined Dallas $750,000, handing billion-dollar franchises a paltry fine does not fix the issue. In turn, anyone with connections to NBA front offices has an advantage gambling-wise if they know teams are deliberately losing, which diminishes the league’s integrity even further.
“Even if you’re not a player out there missing shots on purpose, think about what the message to the public is,” said Holley. “You’re seriously harming the public trust in your product. It’s a problem.”
There is no simple solution to this issue. Sports betting has become a huge industry, projected to reach $18.51 billion in 2025, increasing by over 35 percent from 2024’s total of $13.7 billion. FanDuel and DraftKings are interlocked with the biggest American sports entities and are as popular as ever among sports fans, according to a CBS report. Now, commissioners like Silver are caught between a rock and a hard place, where they have to balance between increasing earnings and protecting the integrity of the league, partially due to their own decisions.
“If you’re the commissioner of any of these leagues, what you’re hoping for is that you can minimize the problem, and you’re praying your athletes are driven by their competitive desire,” Holley said.
Nevertheless, the investigations continue, and new information will surface. In the meantime, the games will go on, and the money will flow.
