The blackmail is the real concern
For the past two years, Jontay Porter has been the posterchild for dumb athlete gamblers. This week, his story grew into something else.
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, we’re talking about the biggest sports story of the week.
By now you’ve likely read a number of takes on the juicy NBA gambling scandal.
A journeyman point guard and two NBA coaches were accused Thursday by the FBI of conspiring to rig parts of NBA games for profit. They weren’t throwing games, per se, but sharing inside information and conspiring to fix wagers on individual player stats.
It’s just the latest in a string of similar scandals that have snared active athletes in many sports—including college basketball, college football, college baseball, NBA, NFL and MLB—and it’s a nightmare for Adam Silver and the rest of the NBA. That said, I’ve been covering the growing sports betting industry for more than a decade, and I think many journalists and fans still misunderstand the biggest risk.
If I’m the NBA, or any other major league for that matter, I’m not worried about more players thinking they can get away with micro match-fixing. I’m worried about the blackmail. Let me explain.
Sportsbooks exist to separate bettors from their money. And over the past few decades, the smart operators realized that if you only bet on the outcome of a game, you can only lose your money once. To speed up the process, sportsbooks developed a whole new suite of betting options, including in-game wagers and bets on specific players and specific stats. You can now wager on whether the first pitch of the 7th inning will be a ball or a strike, or whether LeBron James will score 10 points in the first quarter.
On its face, those markets seem extremely easy for athletes to fix. Just throw one pitch in the dirt. Miss a couple early shots. Who’s going to know?
The truth, however, is that this is really easy to detect. Sportsbooks and gaming regulators employ the services of integrity monitors who collect data on millions of daily wagers and search for any sort of suspicious activity. If a new account opens and immediately bets on a single player micro-market, that’s suspicious. If a single account seems abnormally good at predicting the outcome of a single player’s games, that’s suspicious. If a player who usually receives minimal betting volume suddenly sees a surge in wagers on one side, that’s suspicious.
These monitors also have insight into some of the grey and black markets. They’re good at what they do. Small illegal bookies can sometimes spot this fraud even faster, and in that case, the punishment can be way worse.
It’s taken a while for athletes to catch up to the sophistication of this surveillance. In 2019, Arizona Cardinals safety Josh Shaw became one of the first NFL players suspended for wagering legally on his own team’s games. How was he caught? When he filled out the intake form for Caesars rewards, he wrote “professional football player” as his occupation. Athletes now know to not do that.
The next phase of pro athlete betting scandals were what I’d put in the category of ‘rules confusion.’ In 2023, for example, Tennessee Titans tackle Nicholas Petit-Frere was suspended six games for violating the league’s gambling rules. Petite-Frere wasn’t betting on NFL games, but he was wagering on other sports from the Titans’ practice facility, and that’s not allowed. In response, leagues and teams increased education efforts around their gambling bylaws, and by now, I’d imagine most pros understand the ground rules.
Integrity monitoring is the next major lesson to learn, and there’s clearly still confusion. In July, MLB announced that Cleveland Guardians pitcher Luis Ortiz was placed on paid leave amid a gambling investigation. He was identified because a firm called IC360 noticed a suspicious pattern on wagers from two of his starts. More specifically, the gamblers had placed large bets that Ortiz would throw a ball on the first pitch of the second inning in a June 15 game against the Mariners, and the first pitch of the third inning of a June 27 game against the Cardinals. In both instances, Ortiz threw pitches way outside the strike zone.
This is one of those pitches lol 👇
For a long time, it looked like Jontay Porter fit neatly into this narrative. A fringe NBA player since 2020, Porter became a household name last year when he was suspended—then banned for life—for gambling on basketball. There were multiple instances, but the one that drew the most attention was a March 20 game against the Kings, when Porter allegedly told gamblers that he would feign an illness and leave the game early. His accomplices placed an $80,000 parlay on Porter failing to hit multiple statistical targets. The bet would have won $1.1 million, but it was so irregular that when it was flagged, DraftKings froze the account and refused to pay the winnings.
Porter’s story was viewed largely as a cautionary tale of a corrupt athlete… until this week, when the FBI dropped news of a much wider NBA betting scandal that shed light on Porter’s possible motivations.
There’s a whole lot in these new allegations—it’s actually two cases, one about basketball and an even crazier one about rigged poker—but Porter stuck out to me. During that March 20 game, according to the feds, Porter was coerced into rigging games by others who threatened him due to his pre-existing gambling debts.
THIS is the thing that worries me if I’m the NBA. Players will eventually learn that gaming these micro-bets is not worth the risk. Soon they’ll stop trying. But bad people will never lose the desire to make a quick dollar via fixed wagers. And pressuring an athlete into helping is a pretty easy way to gain an edge.
An employee at one of the bigger integrity monitors once walked me through how this typically happens overseas. Across Europe, soccer players are routinely groomed into gambling accomplices by cons who follow a relatively consistent playbook. They befriend athletes and once in the inner circle, threaten to expose stars if they’re not willing to share a little info. Once an athlete shares a nugget or two on a teammate’s injury or a coach’s scheme, the blackmail escalates. Athletes are told they have two choices: 1) help rig markets, or 2) be exposed as a cheat. It’s one big game of leverage.
This is the exact scenario laid out in a 2006 memo that the FBI published on its website titled, Don’t Bet On It: Advice to Athletes on Sports Gambling. In it, the assistant chief of the bureau’s transnational criminal enterprises section says: “Mobsters never consider it a one-time deal… They will probably blackmail you to keep you participating in their schemes.”
Sadly, there’s only so much education that can help here. ‘Be careful who you let in your inner circle’ might be the one lesson professional athletes will collectively never learn. And we, as a result, will collectively never be free from these bet-rigging scandals.
Lev’s 🔥 Take: I had my own first-day angle on this scandal for Sportico dot com. Tanking has been among the NBA’s biggest challenges for more than a decade, with the level of public criticism ebbing and flowing each year. The allegations by the FBI suggest that the Portland Trail Blazers’ decision to tank at the end of the 2022-23 season—when they eventually secured the No. 3 draft pick—created an easy opportunity for coach Chauncy Billups to share inside information to gamblers. Perhaps this renewed spotlight on tanking will push the league to put in place more policies to disincentivize teams from intentionally losing games. Read the story here.
On the most recent Sporticast episode, Scott and Eben spoke with Stan Kasten, the president and CEO of the Los Angeles Dodgers, about the team’s success both on and off the field. In that conversation, he told these two hilarious stories about the team’s courtship of Japanese free agents Shohei Ohtani and Rōki Sasaki. 👇
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.