Pro sports has found its first sacrificial lamb as it applies to modern-day, legalized gambling. Critics of sports gambling have warned about concerns around integrity, specifically as it applies to bettors learning inside information that could dramatically impact a bet. This week, those concerns were validated, as Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter received a lifetime ban from the NBA for providing confidential information to bettors. With legalized sports gambling just getting off the ground, Porter’s ban may just be the tip of the iceberg as it applies to unethical and illegal behaviors associated with winning sports bets.
Integrity of the game
To the untrained eye, learning about a player disclosing confidential information that could help win a bet may not seem like that big of a deal. When you delve deeper, however, you soon begin to see that when you lose credibility, you essentially lose everything, and that’s the precise concern professional sports have in this moment. Ironically, if not for the support of professional and college sports leaders we would not have legalized sports gambling in this moment, but the potential windfall of revenue made off of gambling finally prevailed. The problem, however, is that not nearly enough infrastructure was put in place before gambling became legal, allowing for problems like the Jontay Porter story.
When fans, and even the athletes themselves, begin to think that a sport is fixed, the entire competition model collapses. It is for this reason that the NBA has reacted quickly and with force, essentially providing Porter no wiggle room for rehabilitation after receiving a lifetime ban punishment. How many of these kinds of public relations hits can pro and college sports take? And as more players are suspended and/or banned, how will that impact the overall success of the team? How will pro and college sports ever fully control for cheating, especially considering the number of games on any given day, and how subtle many bets are that fly under the radar?
What do you do about star players?
Jontay Porter is probably not an athlete you have heard of, and for most fans this story probably won’t hang around very long at the water cooler at work. In fact, while we will never know, conspiracy theorists will suggest the NBA is probably happy it was Porter (a fringe player) who got caught, and not one of the league’s stars like LeBron James or Steph Curry. And that brings me to my next point: What happens when the next pro athlete who cheats happens to be a premier player? Sure, it’s easy to make an example out of a guy like Porter who has averaged 3.7 points per game for his career, but there almost certainly will come a time — likely sooner rather than later — where the commissioner of a major pro sports league is going to be faced with a disciplinary decision around a sports gambling illegality by one of the better players in the league. In fact, what if not one recognizable players gets caught, but several players — or even an entire team?
Are pro and college sports prepared for this moment? Absolutely not. As is always the case, potential revenue drove the decision to add legalized sports gambling to the mix, but in the race to the bank it does not appear as though any sports leaders seriously considered how many ways this change could go wrong — beginning with the actual players making unscrupulous gambling decisions.
Final thoughts
Making an example out of Jontay Porter is one thing, but what happens in the future when the players become more recognizable to fans, and valuable to a franchise? Will all-star caliber players be held accountable the same as bench players? If so, how will teams navigate the possibility of losing a franchise-caliber player forever? And if they make exceptions for star players, how will that wear with the rest of the players in a locker room, or the integrity of the sport at-large?
drstankovich.com
