Gambling is hurting sport, as NBA scandal attests

Last week, the sports world faced one of its worst nightmares. The Justice Department announced the indictments of Chauncey Billups, the coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, and Terry Rozier, a guard for the Miami Heat, on gambling-related charges.

- David French

The grand opening of the FanDuel Sportsbook room, at the Mohegan Sun casino in Uncasville, Connecticut, on March 5, 2022.

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Billups — along with 30 other defendants — was charged for his involvement in a Mafia scheme to rig illegal poker games in New York City and across the country. Rozier and five other defendants were charged with wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies related to a scheme in which Rozier allegedly changed his in-game behaviour to rig so-called prop bets.

As the indictment defines it, a prop bet (short for proposition bet) is a bet “regarding the occurrence or nonoccurrence during a game of an event not directly affecting the game’s outcome”. A gambler can wager on whether a player will score over or under a certain number of points, for example, or whether a person will make or miss a certain number of 3-point shots.

The indictment included a number of reported incidents of bet-rigging. In one of them, Rozier told a co-conspirator that he was going to remove himself from a game in the first quarter, almost certainly guaranteeing that a number of key statistics — including points scored — would be under the amount predicted.