Will Leitch: I’m shocked – shocked! – to find that gambling is going on in the NBA

Every time a new story of gambling’s corrosive effects on sports breaks, there is a gambling defender out there saying it is not that big of a deal. Players suspended for placing bets on themselves? Hey, he got caught; that’s the system working. Coach starting off a news conference talking about how he and his family are regularly harassed by gamblers? Hey, there are always some bad apples out there. A surge in gambling addiction among young people, including teenagers? Hey, most adults can handle this stuff just fine and can make their own decisions.

And yet these scandals keep happening. And they show no signs of abating. If anything, they are getting worse.

The FBI announced Thursday that it had arrested more than 30 people, including Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, after a wide-ranging investigation involving illegal poker rings run by the mob and illegal prop bets that featured inside information available only to NBA players and coaches. There were two “separate but related” investigations: Billups’ involved the mob-run poker games, and Rozier’s involved a game he left early, which he alerted bettors to ahead of time so they could bet the under on his stats and later split the winnings. Rozier’s case, said the FBI, is connected to the previous case of Jontay Porter, who was banned for life by the NBA last year for a similar scandal.

FBI Director Kash Patel called it the NBA’s “insider trading” scandal, though it should be noted that later in the news conference, Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York referred to the “Toronto Rangers” being involved, so these may not be hoops fans. But this is, obviously, not limited to the NBA. Ten NFL players were suspended during a three-month span in 2023 for gambling-related activity; college basketball is in the midst of a small-school point-shaving investigation; Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz missed the end of the Guardians’ season (and their playoff series) because they’re being investigated by Major League Baseball themselves for “irregular betting patterns” during multiple game appearances. These are only the most recent examples, and it stands to reason that there are surely others we do not know about. And of course certainly more to come.

Professional sports leagues and television networks have embraced gambling for financial reasons – despite a century of gambling being so forbidden after the Black Sox scandal of 1919 that Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle were banned from baseball simply for being casino greeters. Now, it is impossible to watch any sporting event without being inundated with gambling advertisements, to the point that they are integrated within the broadcast (there is nothing quite like an announcers telling you where on your phone to gamble on the free throw you are about to watch someone shoot) or even broadcast by the actual gambling establishments themselves. Thirty teams, across MLB, NBA and NHL, have their games shown locally exclusively on the FanDuel Sports Networks.

For all the signs across clubhouses and locker rooms that players who gamble on their own sports face serious consequences, you can hardly blame a player for wondering how seriously such rules are supposed to be taken. Their stadiums and games are themselves advertisements for gambling. Rozier played games last year in D.C.’s Capital One Arena, which contains a physical sportsbook inside the arena. If leagues are trying to emphasize how awful gambling is to its players, they are doing a terrible job of it.

Sports can survive just about anything you throw at them: Performance enhancing drugs. Labor-management fights. Off-the-field malfeasance. Rising ticket prices. Public financing of stadiums for billionaires. We fans always come back.

But the one thing sports cannot survive are fans who no longer trust the games to be on the level. If you do not believe that players and their teams are playing only to win – that you are watching a fair competition with everyone trying their best – then there is no reason to watch sports at all.

That is why the Black Sox scandal was so destructive: If the players do not care whether they win or lose – or if they will fix a game, or a play, or a free throw, or a pitch, just for money – then why should any of us care?

The Billups and Rozier scandals are not as bad as the Shoeless Joe scandal. But they are still very, very bad. And there are more coming. How could there not be?

Will Leitch is the author of “Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride,” a contributing editor at New York magazine and founder of Deadspin.