10 Takes: NBA's Latest Betting Scandals
NBA Substack on the Chauncey Billups and Terry Rozier arrests ... and the league's response
We asked 10 leading NBA voices on Substack:
Your take on the NBA’s betting scandals?
Check out their answers and subscribe!
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Trust.
Trust from the public specifically.
That’s my No. 1 curiosity about #thisleague right now.
How much has been lost over the past two months merely through what’s been alleged about the LA Clippers in L’Affaire Kawhi Leonard and now these stunning arrests?
Can the loss even be quantified? Instinct tells me that some nuance has to spliced in with all the full-blown crisis talk — I can still remember that a fair percentage of the masses vowing to quit the NBA forever after the Tim Donaghy scandal didn’t follow through — but Adam Silver’s description of “deeply disturbing” only begins to cover it … amid no shortage of dread circulating leaguewide about who else might be implicated.
The new season, in short, has begun under a cloud as unimaginably gloomy as any you’ll find actually floating in the atmosphere. Think about it: The Malice of Auburn Hills (my personally preferred nickname to The Malice at The Palace) happened on Nov. 19 of the 2004-05 season. It’s not even Halloween yet in 2025. And Miami’s Terry Rozier and Portland’s Chauncey Billups — an active head coach! — were just placed on indefinite leave by the league office because of an FBI probe into alleged illegal gambling.
On Day 3 of the season.
I still don’t quite have the words.
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Let’s answer some key questions FAQ-style:
Will this story get louder or quieter?
It will get quieter because almost everyone surrounding it is incentivized to keep it quieter. To quote the investor Charlie Munger: “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the result.” This is, in my opinion, a massive sports scandal, but the sports world has demonstrated an ability to digest and move on from betting scandals of this scale.
Will the NBA see any long-term impact or damage?
Yes, but not necessarily specifically from this exact situation. This is now just one of multiple red flags indicating that the sport can’t actually maintain integrity while merged with legalized gambling. What I’m saying is, the league won’t be damaged by this one scandal, but if it keeps racking up gambling scandals (and why wouldn’t it?), it absorbs a real cumulative damage.
What do you expect and/or want the NBA to do?
I think it’s a little early for expectations, but I find “What do you want the NBA to do?” to be an interesting angle. Divorced from the specifics of this case, I want the Play-In removed, and the NBA lottery to be equal odds for every team missing the postseason. Increase the revenue prize for teams that make the playoffs to disincentivize any franchise from intentionally entering the lottery.
What I’m saying is: Tanking is such an effective cover for these sorts of shenanigans that the sport needs to aggressively remove all incentive to tank.
What else has your attention?
If the FBI indictment is accurate, I think there’s a pretty good chance that Chauncey Billups intentionally threw a game (as opposed to merely tipping off gamblers to a likely result). He’s the coach, after all, and he isn’t a passive party to the result he’d be hypothetically tipping criminals off to. But if the Blazers wanted Billups to tank, then he might have been point shaving, but losing was the goal his bosses wanted. This all makes my head hurt.
See also: Ethan’s NBA Gambling Emergency Pod
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Like with that other scandal involving the Clippers, the NBA would love for this to just blow over … but a lot of that depends on how many additional names and allegations are left to be revealed.
Either way, it’s a terrible look for the league — and a rather big escalation to go from a relative scrub like Jontay Porter at the center of a scandal to a semi-star like Terry Rozier and a literal Hall of Famer like Chauncey Billups.
Because gambling money is everywhere in the sport now, there was always a mutual incentive for everyone to look the other way and ignore the warning signs — especially around vulnerabilities like player props — until something like this happened. Now it has and it might just be the tip of the iceberg.
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It’s sad because Billups was such a respected leader. But our fate is usually determined by the decisions we make. It doesn’t cancel out the goodwill and the contributions that made Billups a Hall of Famer and a champion. But it’s yet another validation of the Bill Cosby Rule: No matter how well you think you know the suit or the uniform or the face, none of us really know the person. Pedestals are unsafe at any height.
Beyond that, it didn’t take a Greek mythology scholar to know that widespread gambling would become a massive, unlockable Pandora’s box, and that the NBA would be uniquely vulnerable.
Lifetime bans like the one that kept Pete Rose out of baseball would seem to be the only solution, and not just for the Terry Roziers of the league. But as long as LeBron is making DraftKings ads, what’s a commissioner to do?
Jake Fischer | | Contributor to
One aspect of this story I want to discuss: Gambling was part of NBA culture before gambling became part of the NBA’s business.
I’m not talking parlays; I’m talking booray. Cards. Poker, spades, you name it. Those are pastimes among NBA players and coaches just as much as group dinners on the road and birthday parties at New York clubs.
Perhaps that is something the NBA didn’t consider before encouraging the legalization of betting — now they’ve opened Pandora’s box among a fraternity of uber-competitive alphas.
At this point, I don’t know how the league office can think this issue is going to ever be anything but a serious hazard within this fantasy world it dreamed about.
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It’s been fascinating as a bleak barometer of the cultural climate we’re in that I’ve yet to hear these circumstances described as an example of cause and effect. Instead, the handwringing to explain what’s befallen Chauncey Billups et al. has ranged from addiction to Donald Trump’s revenge to a league so fully cooked in its allegiance to sports betting that this was inevitable.
But perhaps the worst of all to sit through has been watching so many now peel the wool from their eyes about Billups: That this is his moral failing, not the 1997 sexual-assault allegation that he later settled in civil court — a case that never stood in the way of his coaching career or continued access to power.
Proof, as if we needed any more, that the threat to profit is greater than harm against the individual.
See also: Katie on the NBA betting scandal
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Sadly the NBA’s latest betting-related scandal was as predictable as it was disappointing. This also probably won’t be the last shoe to drop. Whether more NBA names connected to this current investigation come out, or there’s a new scandal, it feels naïve to think we’re done.
As I have anytime that anything linked to fixing games or player stats has come up, I fully support a ban from the NBA. If sports aren’t on the level, they start to become like WWE. Entertaining, sure, but decided before the event even starts.
I think the NBA has to be careful here, too. The league already faces an endless number of conspiracy theories associated with the draft lottery, officiating, player movement, etc. You can’t really control all of that.
But the league can control how it reacts to current members of the NBA engaging in nefarious acts. Anything but the harshest of punishments is unacceptable.
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Watching NBA commissioner Adam Silver deliver his Thursday night interview about the day’s gambling arrests, I couldn’t help but think of Captain Louis Renault in Casablanca: Shocked — shocked Silver was — to find gambling going on in his establishment! The comparison came to mind despite Claude Rains getting Oscar nominated for his performance while Silver’s prostration wasn’t nearly as convincing.
Then again, it didn’t need to be. By giving the story its requisite lip service, the NBA and its partners were smart enough to know that it would go away as quickly as it came, just another victim of the unrelenting news cycle.
If the league really cared, it would have temporarily severed the multitude of ties it has to various wagering entities as an act of penance, and maybe even as a chance to assess whether it truly had a handle on this unruly operation — but of course no such thing happened. How could it? With the amount of money at stake, the owners (and players, for that matter) would have had his head in a heartbeat. Your winnings, sir.
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This feels both shocking and inevitable.
What is most discouraging, however, is the fact that the NBA’s own investigations essentially cleared Terry Rozier, only for the FBI to arrest him subsequently. It reeks of rug-sweeping, and does not inspire much faith in the NBA’s handling of the Clippers-Kawhi Leonard saga, which has become quieter and quieter.
Separately, it is worth noting that one of the indicted figures in the Billups poker-game scheme, Ammar Awawdeh — described in the indictment as an alleged associate of the Gambino crime family — is linked to the broader NBA gambling investigations. In other words, the NBA’s supposedly separate gambling scandals appear more intertwined and far-reaching than publicly acknowledged. And if the full extent does come to light, it likely won’t be because of the NBA’s investigative capabilities.
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I expect the NBA to do little to nothing. Did the Jontay Porter case have any consequences for the league? And Terry Rozier is only a slightly bigger name.
But if they want to implement a relatively simple fix for the Porter/Rozier type of situations, they could just significantly limit “under” prop bets on relative unknowns. Maybe that’s the job of the sportsbooks, though.
Regardless, I want the NBA to go back to its pre-legalization days.
Call my views extreme, but I think gambling has almost exclusively negative effects on society. Legalized sports betting isn’t any better, as it correlates with a rise in bankruptcies and a decrease in credit scores.
Sure, people found ways to gamble before legalization. But society would benefit from being bombarded by fewer sports gambling ads that try to trigger financial FOMO.
"Call my views extreme, but I think gambling has almost exclusively negative effects on society. Legalized sports betting isn’t any better, as it correlates with a rise in bankruptcies and a decrease in credit scores."
Those shouldn't be extreme and they aren't even views: that gambling is corrosive of society and tantamount to a tax on poor people who participate are facts. You don't even need to accept that gambling is actually addictive to arrive at the conclusion that it's baneful.
I'm with everyone who wishes that gambling would go away. But realize that if you do that, the activity of gambling doesn't go away- much of that money will just go to illegal organized crime.
I think any half-aware NBA fan knows that there was always gambling in the NBA behind the scenes, but we were always made to believe that the card games on the plane didn't affect the product on the court. These recent scandals threaten the integrity of the game. If Silver doesn't come down hard on those who participated, then he risks being replaced when the next scandals inevitably happen.
Is it hypocritical for the league to come down on players who gamble while accepting all that Hard Rock and FanDuel money? Sorta. But that's the reality of the business.