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Do the numbers in sports tell a story, or just settle a bet?
Los Angeles Times
|November 29, 2025
Sports-TV debates and legalized gambling are drowning out the love of the games
ETHAN MILLER Getty Images
BETTING on March Madness in Las Vegas in 2018. In most states now, bets can be placed legally online using a smartphone.
IN ANY GIVEN YEAR there are more than 500,000 American boys playing on almost 20,000 high school basketball teams, and fewer than 2% of them will make it to March Madness. Only 60 young men get drafted by an NBA team each summer, and in the most recent draft, a third of those spots went to international players.
The numbers suggest the funnel from the Amateur Athletic Union into the NBA is one of the narrowest in all of sports. And we used to talk about the game with the reverence that exclusivity implies. The numbers are how we decide who is an All Star or a Hall of Famer. The numbers are how we determine — or debate — the greatest.
Gambling and cheating scandals are not the only threats to sports. Because of the economic gravity of fantasy sports leagues and legal gambling, the numbers most of us hear about these days have more to do with bettors making money than with players making shots.
Cette histoire est tirée de l'édition November 29, 2025 de Los Angeles Times.
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