Was this NBA betting scandal inevitable?

0:00So a couple years back, Terry Rozier had a pretty tough day on the court. Jared Rozier's still in the game. He's played every minute of our first quarter. That's tape there from the NBA. It was March 2023, the Charlotte Hornets against the New Orleans Pelicans. Rozier, who then played for the Hornets, had logged just five points, four rebounds, and two assists in the first quarter. When suddenly, he exited the game with what the team described as, quote, foot discomfort. All those totals were well below his season averages, and the Hornets, well, they lost. So the New Orleans Falcons sweep the season series away from your Hornets.

0:39And Terry Rozier did not play again that season. Two years later. Good morning. Today we are here in New York to announce a historic arrest across a wide sweeping criminal enterprise that envelops both the NBA. The FBI is investigating a major sports betting scandal. And Rozier's low stats in that very game were part of the investigation. Rozier was arrested on Thursday. His lawyer told NPR that the players' arrests had come as a surprise and said that prosecutors had previously communicated that Rozier was a, quote, subject, not a target of their investigation. In a press conference, FBI Director Kash Patel described the scope of the allegations.

1:21This is an illegal gambling operation and sports rigging operation that spanned the course of years. The FBI led a coordinated takedown across 11 states to arrest over 30 individuals today responsible for this case. There are two major illegal gambling schemes, the FBI says. One involving bets placed on NBA games. The other involving underground poker games and organized crime. Consider this. This scandal is exactly what critics of legalized sports gambling were worried about. Now that it's happened, what's next for the NBA? and betting in general.

2:00From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang.

2:09It's Consider This from NPR. In recent years, the NBA, like other major sports leagues, has deepened its ties with the lucrative sports betting industry. For more on this, we're joined by columnist Kevin Blackistone of The Washington Post. Welcome. Thank you. I just want to start out by asking, what was your reaction when you saw the news this morning? Well, I wasn't surprised, but I was stunned by the details. And those details being the technological advancements that have been made in betting cheating, which was displayed in this story. And also the involvement of the crime families in New York that are, you know, straight out of Hollywood.

2:49I know. It's like movies writing itself. But what are like the remaining questions you have at this point? Because there's still so much to learn about what's been going on. Sure. Well, one thing we want to know is how isolated this is. In any given season in the NBA, there are 500, 550 players on the rosters. And so now in the past few years, we've seen five get busted for gambling. And so how many more are there? We also saw a number of years ago a referee, Tim Donaghy, get busted for helping to throw games for gamblers, and he was sentenced to prison. So are there any referees who are involved in this?

3:30So just how widespread or how localized this happens to be. Well, I want to talk more widely about the history of sports betting in this country because, you know, in 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a law that prohibited sports betting in most states. And then sports betting became widely available because you could do it on your phone. You could do it anywhere, right? How has that accessibility changed people's relationship to betting on sports, you think? Well, you know, oddly, most people who have studied this, economists and sociologists, they really don't draw any line between transparency in the sport and corruption.

4:09What they do draw the line between is the money that is available in gambling. And right now, this country is on a collision course with the$1 trillion mark for gambling. That's estimated to be hit in about 2030. So there is so much money out there in gambling that everybody gets attracted to it. You know, Las Vegas is a fabulous place where people like to go. And if you think about it, when we report in the news that the Powerball lottery is at some astronomical number, people go out and bet, right? If it's reported that it's at$10 ,000, it doesn't make news. And we can assume that no one's out there.

4:52So it's the amount of money that's available, according to experts. that really draws people to gambling. And, you know, sports gambling has been around forever. I mean, you can go back to the ancient Greece Olympics, right? And you can find evidence of it. Oh, sure, find evidence of gambling. What effect do you think these types of scandals have on fans, like on their interest or their trust in the games that they're watching? Is it corrosive, these kinds of scandals? You know, one would think so, But we haven't seen people turn away from games because of gambling. In fact, we've seen the very opposite.

5:30Now that more and more gambling is available, legal gambling is available to fans, it has driven up the interest. And the problem, the real problem for sports is what we have come to call prop bets. That is what has happened in this situation with the NBA. And prop bets are not bets on the outcomes of games, but prop bets are bets on the outcome of individual performances within games. And so one of the things that Terry Rozier is accused of in this particular case is that he took himself out of games purposely, but under the ruse of injury, in order to keep his output for that particular game below that which bettors were willing to bet.

6:18And that's a real problem. I don't think that you can get the toothpaste back in the tube at this point, but I think gambling really needs to look at getting prop bets out of the game. It's not going to get out of the game on the illegal side, but certainly on the legal side. And when you have ESPN putting up ESPN bet, Bandool, all of these huge companies now involved in betting, and so much of it is involved in prop betting, you have created a new avenue for corruption. Kevin Blackistone is a national sports columnist at The Washington Post and a journalism professor at the University of Maryland.

6:53Thank you very much. Thank you. This episode was produced by Michael Levitt and Daniel Offman. Additional reporting in this episode from Becky Sullivan. It was edited by Russell Lewis, Justine Kennan, and our executive producer, Sammy Yenigan.

7:08It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.