The gambling problem
Porter and Ohtani investigations should be a wake-up call about risks of sports betting
It’s not as though nobody saw this coming. Plenty of credible folks who’ve watched closely as North America’s sports leagues lustily jumped into bed with the sportsbetting industry over the past handful of years have been predicting a calamity.
A sports-betting scandal is coming, they’ve been saying. And a big one.
Maybe nobody had two big scandals arriving in the span of a week.
Alas, here we are. Most of 30 years since the NBA, then run by staunchly anti-gambling commissioner David Stern, badgered the province of Ontario into taking NBA games off Proline parlay cards as a condition of bringing the Raptors to town, the enthusiastically pro-gambling NBA led by Stern’s successor Adam Silver is in the midst of an investigation into Raptors fringe player Jontay Porter over what folks in the industry call “irregularities” around bets of suspiciously large sums on Porter-related props.
Maybe there’s an explanation that exonerates Porter. But let’s just say that if it turns out this is one big misunderstanding and Porter is wholly uninvolved in this highly suspicious spate of gambling activity on his stats, he is the victim of at least a few wild coincidences.
This comes a few days after Major League Baseball appeared blindsided by the events that led to the Los Angeles Dodgers firing the interpreter and close friend of Shohei Ohtani, only the biggest star in the sport, for allegedly stealing millions from Ohtani to pay off gambling debts to an illegal bookmaker currently under U.S. federal investigation.
We’re in the early days of both cases, but there’s no getting around what has become obvious: As quickly as North America’s big sports leagues have wrapped their arms around lucrative betting partnerships of late, they’re just as quickly finding out that the relationship comes with consequences for which they’re not fully prepared.
The flood of headlines tells you as much. Last week, Cleveland Cavaliers coach J.B. Bickerstaff told reporters that his children have been threatened by disgruntled bettors. Indiana Pacers all-star Tyrese Haliburton said his social media interactions with fans are so riddled with gambling chatter that he feels he is seen as a mere “prop” for sports bettors.
Which, if you listen to athletes, has become a new reality in a world where fans are force-fed gambling information and enticements while opportunities to lay bets have never been more numerous.
Beyond all that, earlier this month Rudy Gobert of the Minnesota Timberwolves was fined $100,000 (U.S.) by the NBA for rubbing his fingers together in the money sign while gesturing to a referee. That it wasn’t just any referee but Scott Foster — a one-time co-worker and friend of Tim Donaghy, the NBA official banned from the league in another betting scandal in 2007 — had to have folks in the league office shuddering. You didn’t need an interpreter to understand Gobert’s insinuation that the fix was in.
Therein lies the problem. As match-fixing expert Declan Hill was saying in a recent interview, suddenly you don’t need to be a way-out conspiracy theorist to believe Gobert might be onto something.
“Right now, a fair-minded sports fan could be looking at this and going, ‘Whoa, what’s this? Why are there players starting to make gestures at the referee? Why are so many coaches being harassed by gamblers?’” said Hill, associate professor of investigations at the University of New Haven. “I think a general, good-faith sports fan, without even getting into the realm of conspiracy theorists, can start to doubt what they’re seeing. That’s a huge problem.”
Part of the problem, Hill said, is that leagues and governments haven’t invested enough in safeguards to ward off potential scandal. Toronto police aren’t investigating Porter, perhaps in part because Canada doesn’t have a specific law against match-fixing and underperformance. And as for the NBA investigation: They’re on top of it now. But as ESPN has pointed out, bookmakers noted considerable sums being wagered on Porter to underperform his prop bets going back to a game in January.
While Ohtani has denied all knowledge of his interpreter’s betting, reports say the interpreter met the bookmaker in question at a 2021 poker game that included major-league players at a team hotel.
“You’re telling me Major League Baseball security missed that?” Hill said. “If you’re going to make these deals with the devil, you’d better take some of that money and protect your soul. And your soul, as a sports league, is the credibility of your product, the integrity of your product.”
You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to suggest the growing prevalence of gambling has put the soul of pro sports very much under threat. That should be of concern to anyone who cares about the games, but ought to terrify Porter. Sports leagues have survived betting scandals in the past. The careers of individual sports people in the centre of such storms often haven’t fared as well.
The Blue Jays’ bat signals have been stronger with season opener on deck