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Posted on 10/24/2025 3:27:27 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The NBA scoreboard has turned into a stock ticker. Crowd chants, but half of them are watching their parlays instead of the play. Somewhere a coach calls timeout; somewhere else a bookmaker grins. This was always coming. The NBA invited gambling to the game when it signed lucrative sponsorship deals and paved the way for odds and offers to be splashed over our TV screens during games. So when the FBI finally showed up on Thursday, they were simply collecting the rent.
Portland head coach Chauncey Billups, whose playing career ended with his induction in the hall of fame, and Miami guard Terry Rozier were arrested Thursday in connection with an FBI investigation into allegations of illegal gambling and rigged poker games. Former player and assistant coach Damon Jones, who allegedly provided “inside information” about NBA games to bettors, was also taken into custody.
The FBI says Rozier told people close to him that he would leave a 2023 Hornets game early in a move that would help those in the know to haul in huge betting wins (the player’s lawyer says prosecutors “appear to be taking the word of spectacularly incredible sources rather than relying on actual evidence of wrongdoing”).
Billups, who has denied the allegations through his lawyer, is not accused of any wrongdoing related to the NBA, but is instead alleged to have taken part in rigged poker games with ties to the mafia. But even so, when the NBA got into bed with the big gambling companies, it normalized the culture of monetization of the game and the pitfalls and problems that come with betting.
If you want to see where gambling leads, look toward Texas, where casino magnate Miriam Adelson, billionaire heir to the Las Vegas Sands fortune and majority owner of the Dallas...
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
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Now we know why LeBron James missed so many games with toenail fungus.
The FBI won’t shutdown the NBA. The Chicoms are paying too much to be entertained and showing the folks in China “this is what Americans act like”.
I love how The Guardian totally ignores how the Premier League also is heavily sponsored by sports betting apps. It is even on team uniforms.
Virtually all of professional sport caters to gambling. I read that gambling on the NFL now generates more revenue than the league itself, and that doesn’t even count the illicit gambling.
They’re never happy with what they have. They have to be greedy, and try to get more, any way they can.
I predict this will all come crashing down when trial lawyers realize how lucrative it would be to represent losing gamblers in lawsuits against professional sports leagues, teams, and even coaches and players.
Good luck in policing 361 Division 1 NCAA basketball schools.
It's all WWE...guess sports are trying to compete with politics/other now for most corrupt.
Like the man said..."it's all about the dollars"
These are no longer sports - they are entertainment products. Like Danish cheddar cheese transformed into Kraft American Singles, while raising ticket and merchandise prices. :)
Likewise the NFL.
There’s going to be something similar happening in the NFL if it hasn’t already.
It's been that way for a while. Now it's just out in the open.
It's like betting on a WWE "fight" where at the last minute the ref is distracted while your guy takes a chair to the head and loses.
It's like the oversized bet placed at the last minute on a long short horse.
Now, instead of one large last-minute bet, companies such as FanDuel and SportKings pick up large quantities of small suspicious bets from overseas bettors.
We don’t watch TV, even if somebody be the name of Jimmy the Italian, comes on the scene.
Gambling always leads to corruption and ruins the fortunes of people.
Seeing how NBA players act playing thug-ball may just scare the bejeebers out of the average Chinese citizen.
College sports will have a similar scandalous moment .
The obscene NIL money is disgusting
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