Gambling scandal will shake public confidence in NBA, experts say

Attorney Bill Pascrell III was made aware of the incoming NBA gambling scandal involving Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, and former player and coach Damon Jones late Wednesday night, but said the magnitude of the findings “was much greater than I had expected.”

The news of the investigation broke early Thursday morning, with the FBI arresting Billups, Rozier, and Jones, who were among 34 people across 11 states charged in connection to two schemes: defrauding sports gamblers and a rigged poker game run in connection with New York City mafia families.

Pascrell, a gambling expert and Princeton Public Affairs Group partner, said the incident is “a black eye on the NBA.”

“I think [the NBA] has done a very good job of getting ahead of it now,” Pascrell told The Inquirer by telephone, “and I’m sure there’s going to be a multitude of actions and punishments, and I think there needs to be an assessment by the NBA of additional internal controls.”

“When it comes to the NBA,” Pascrell added, “they have a responsibility to the players in the league, the coaches, the referees, the families, the fans, and it’s going to take a lot of work to bring about confidence back into the system.”

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Particularly, the involvement of Jones, who allegedly provided bettors injury information regarding two of the Los Angeles Lakers’ best players while he was volunteering with the team during the 2022-23 season, was “very troubling,” Pascrell said.

“Those are things that are very disturbing that the league has to be vigilant about doing a better job policing,” Pascrell said. “I think the NBA is a great brand. I think they have done a great job, and, unfortunately, this mishap is going to be a tough challenge for them to re-instill confidence in the integrity of the game.”

Rozier’s involvement in the gambling scheme by leaving games or altering his performance to make hundreds of thousands of dollars on prop bets was especially concerning to George Diemer, an associate professor in Temple’s School of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management.

Diemer, whose research focuses on gambling, particularly in college basketball, supports sports betting being legalized but has strong opposition to prop bets and the issues the practice brings to gambling.

“Although I do like the gambling market — I am in favor of legalizing sports gambling — I’ve always said to myself and anybody that asks, I’m really worried about these prop bets, and they probably should not be legal,” Diemer said by phone. “A lot of my research is in trying to figure out how point spreads are impacting the game outcome. … Generally speaking, the data suggests that, for instance, like point shaving — maybe there’s too many games where the favorite team is winning the game but failing to cover the point spread, things like that. And I suspect that if I ran a similar investigation for these prop bets, I would probably find something there as well.”

But Diemer added that, “I think these things were identified by and because sports wagering has been legalized. If we lived in a world where sports wagering was illegal, they very well could have still been doing this, but nobody would have known about it because it would have been a complete underground economy.”

Rozier’s alleged involvement comes on the heels of former Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter leaking “confidential information to sports bettors” about his planned poor performances and pleading guilty to a charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud for allegedly faking illness or injury to leave games early.

While Pascrell does not agree that prop bets should be banned in the wake of the scandal, saying that “prop bets aren’t the problem, criminal activity is the problem,” he agrees with Diemer that the monitoring systems in place to detect and notify unusual gambling activity “are going to learn a lot from this, and it’s only going to improve the integrity of the game.”

“I’m not saying monitoring integrity isn’t an evolutionary process. There’s nothing that’s bulletproof,” Pascrell said, “and by passing laws to bet prop bets, you’re only going to move people to the dark side, which is only going to make it more challenging to discover.”