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2024-04-18
The vast majority of people in the legal sports betting industry bubble — present company included — have weathered the Jontay Porter storm in our metaphorical wood-paneled club.
There we are, smoking cigars and drinking fine whiskeys, tsk-tsking Porter for getting caught (and doing so in such a brazen fashion). We pat ourselves on the back, saying these things have been going on since time immemorial, but thank goodness for the repeal of PASPA and the legalization of online sports betting.
For without legal sports betting, Porter might’ve gotten away with it scot-free! Says so right there in the NBA’s official statement: “The suspicious bets involving Porter’s performance in the Raptors’ March 20 game were brought to the NBA’s attention by licensed sports betting operators and an organization that monitors legal betting markets.”
— NBA Communications (@NBAPR) April 17, 2024
Huzzah! Three cheers for the legal sports betting industry!
The only problem: People outside the legal sports betting industry bubble don’t exactly see it this way.
They see the mad rush of legalized gambling has resulted in, at best, sports being soiled by unscrupulous gamblers, and at worst, the end of sport as we know it.
To those outside the bubble, we’re kind of the enemy.
In fact, we’re probably doing ourselves a disservice by smoking cigars and drinking fine whiskeys in our wood-paneled club; a more apt metaphor might be us sitting near-naked by a weak fire passing around a rabbit carcass and congratulating ourselves for not getting completely eaten by the lions.
Read the headlines today in the mainstream media concerning Porter. Nary a mention of the white knight legal industry being the hero.
The Washington Post — like many other outlets — used NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s quote where he says that “legal sports betting creates transparency that helps identify suspicious or abnormal activity” (buried in paragraph seven, after the attribution) but nowhere in the story does the writer mention exactly why this is.
Even sports news outlets didn’t dig in there. The Athletic doesn’t mention it until paragraph 14. And the paragraph before it reads, “The NBA has multiple business arrangements with massive betting brands like DraftKings, FanDuel, and BetMGM, and several of its teams host sportsbooks inside their arenas in which they are paid a percentage of the handle, which is the amount of money wagered.” (Insert twirly mustachioed evil-doer GIF.)
And even where it’s explicitly mentioned — as in this Wall Street Journal op-ed — it’s not exactly listed as a feature.
“That’s been one of the sells of sports betting legalization — that moving the market into the daylight makes it easier to regulate and monitor,” wrote Jason Gay. “And yet it’s hard to not feel that the sports world’s continued bear hug of the business — not just by the leagues, but their media partners — has contributed to a confusing vibe that this is all harmless fun.”
I mentioned at the beginning of this piece the “bubble” we live in. That wasn’t an accident. I cribbed it directly from Steve Ruddock’s Straight to the Point substack.
On Wednesday morning, hours before Porter’s lifetime ban was announced, Ruddock wrote the following: “ … the average person (even the ones who gamble occasionally) doesn’t know what an SGP is, how gambling affiliates work, or the distinction between FanDuel and Bovada. Many people also don’t know basic blackjack rules, that there was an online poker crackdown in 2011, or what baccarat is. Basically, what we, the residents inside these bubbles, consider common knowledge is anything but common knowledge.”
I decided to test his theory.
I sent those six questions to members of my hometown Fantasy Football League, est. 1986. The group is made up of Wall Street whizzes, gym teachers, CFOs, and at least one DraftKings VIP. Everyone in the group is a sports fan, and everyone in the group is a gambler of one stripe or another.
Of the nine people who responded (thanks for nothing, Korman):
Now granted: A) Ruddock wasn’t talking about Porter in particular, and B) this is an unscientific and small sample, but …
If my gambling buddies couldn’t answer these questions — questions that I imagine everyone reading this piece can answer — then how can we expect the public at large to be able to appreciate the nuance in which the Jontay Porter story lives?
Put another, more succinct and perhaps better way: The public couldn’t give a s*** about the distinction between legal and illegal gambling markets. It’s all sports betting to them, and it’s ruining things.
A sampling of comments from WaPo’s Porter story:
“Bye Jontay, it hasn’t been nice getting to know you and your scam. But hello to corrupted sporting events, largely thanks to the pernicious, addictive effects of legal gambling.”
“This is a shock? Likely happens all the time, across all sports. What did people think was going to happen when everyone is embracing gambling?”
“Far from ‘creating transparency that helps identify suspicious or abnormal activity’ the NBA decision to, essentially, make the gambling industry its business partner encourages conduct detrimental to the game by players, maybe coaches, and yes, refs. Not to mention creating temptation among susceptible fans to dangerous addiction.”
There are 637 more comments. Enjoy.
So what’s an industry to do? A pretty good framework was laid out by Matthew Wein, writing in Sports Business Journal yesterday.
Who’s Wein? He is, according to his bio at JustSecurity.org, “a former Policy Advisor to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Assistant Secretary of Policy where he focused on Law Enforcement Policy and International Engagement primarily in the Middle East, Africa and Europe. He also served as an Advisor to the DHS Director of Operations Coordination on Counterterrorism and Intelligence issues.”
In short: He ain’t one of us.
“Leagues and teams should take bold steps to ensure that gambling does not taint their products and they should do so publicly and transparently,” Wein wrote as part of a larger piece outlining what exactly those bold steps should be.
Chief among them is convening an independent commission made up of all the professional sports leagues and the gambling industry, along with five independent commissioners to “take stock of the vulnerabilities that exist and propose steps that promote integrity in a transparent manner.”
What that would result in is a big ol’ “who knows?” at this point, but sitting on our hands — or patting ourselves on the back for a job well done in catching Porter — is clearly not the answer people outside of the bubble are looking for.
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