The NBA is the latest major professional sports league to gain attention as professional sports leagues and teams increasingly embrace sports gambling, fueling its popularity.
The league is currently investigating Toronto Raptors center Jontay Porter for his possible involvement in suspicious prop bets that underperformed his individual performance on two nights. ESPN was the first to report the news. If the gambling allegations are true, Porter could be permanently banned from the league.
“It's a cardinal sin that he's being accused of in the NBA,” Commissioner Adam Silver said Wednesday at the league's annual board meeting.
This has raised questions about how potentially inappropriate or illegal bets are recognized and reported. How can potentially suspicious activity be flagged and brought to the attention of professional sports leagues like the NBA or NFL for possible investigation? The Athletic I tried to answer questions such as:
Can NBA players bet?
The NBA conducts mandatory gambling education sessions for players, coaches, team officials, and referees. As specified in the Player Conduct Memo distributed to teams and players, betting on the NBA by players is prohibited. You may not bet on games, competitions (e.g., All-Star Skills Contest) or events (e.g., draft picks, contract signings, trades, awards, coaching hires, etc.) involving the NBA, WNBA, G League, NBA2K League, or BAL. You will also not be able to participate in NBA fantasy sports, which feature cash prizes and valuable prizes. They can also bet on other sports.
“You may not participate in Prohibited Gambling for others, ask others to participate in Prohibited Gambling on your behalf, or encourage others to participate in Prohibited Gambling,” the Player Conduct Memo states. is stated. “Involvement in prohibited gambling must be avoided.”
This aligns closely with Major League Baseball's gambling rules, which prohibit betting on baseball and leave room for legal wagers elsewhere. The NFL has suspended Calvin Ridley for one year in 2021 for betting on NFL games.
How does the NBA monitor to make sure nothing suspicious is going on?
The NBA has its own internal group of lawyers and full-time data scientists who monitor and investigate irregular bets and line movements. It will be led by Dan Spillane, the NBA's senior vice president of league governance and policy, and Elizabeth Mullinger, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and current senior vice president of the league. The group investigates any unusual activity to see if the betting lines were moved because of something off-base, for example, or something like a late injury or scratch, which could be a more benign explanation. Please check if. The league also has basketball operations and security departments responsible for reliability oversight and enforcement.
But it also uses external resources as part of a data-sharing patchwork of leagues, watchdogs, regulators and gambling operators. It relies on groups such as Sportradar and US Integrity, as well as the International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA), a conglomerate of global betting operators that share information on an ad hoc basis.
“In a legalized structure, there is transparency,” Silver said this week about the benefits of legalized gambling. “As with all the very advanced computers that we've been working with, when there's abnormal behavior, people become aware of it, rather than gambles being made in the shadows and underground.”
The NBA uses Sportradar as its official global betting data distributor, which, along with other authorized partners, allows us to notify the league when a player or league official bets on the NBA. Sportradar also monitors global gambling activity to detect fraudulent activity. The NFL and MLB also use data partners to monitor potentially unusual bets. MLB's authorized gaming operators are contractually required to tell the league if they know of any players or employees who have placed bets that violate gambling rules.
As part of the NBA's agreements with official betting partners FanDuel and DraftKings, they are required to share data, identify suspicious activity, and cooperate with league investigations related to anomalous betting activity. We provide a guarantee. The league has similar agreements with companies that make up a large portion of the U.S. gambling market.
“Maintaining the integrity of the game is of paramount importance and has been since long before sports betting was legalized nationwide,” an NBA spokesperson said. “We have a multifaceted compliance and oversight program that includes comprehensive training on NBA sports betting rules for all players, teams and league officials, internal and third-party monitoring capabilities, and This includes cooperation and information sharing provisions that are included in all commercial partnerships in this field.”
We have watched this process unfold with Porter. According to DraftKings Sportsbook Insights, which is published daily and distributed to members of the media, prop bets placed on January 26 and March 20, which are currently under investigation, will be placed on the night of the DraftKings game. It was said to be the biggest money-making bet ever made on an NBA game. A DraftKings spokesperson could not confirm its accuracy. FanDuel saw unusual activity in Porter's bets on those two nights, said an industry source familiar with the betting. The Athletic. The company reported the incident to US Integrity, a company that monitors sports betting for suspicious activity.
What is Integrity Monitor? What companies does the NBA work with?
US Integrity works with sports leagues, licensed sportsbooks, and regulators to provide a warning system for sports betting. We use a proprietary algorithm built to detect unusual bets and larger than normal line movements. When the algorithm finds something, it sends that information to someone on our research team to see if it should be flagged. The number can be in the hundreds per month.
When a bet or line movement is suspicious enough to be reported, US Integrity will notify the betting operator, appropriate leagues and regulatory authorities, using a two-tier system. There is an advisory notice, but this is more minor and not necessarily nefarious and could indicate a big move from a potentially bad line being exploited. In that case, you will receive an alert in big red all caps to indicate that something is wrong.
US Integrity does not have any personal information about the bettors involved, but does collect unique ticket IDs. Approximately 15-20 alerts are sent each month to all licensed sportsbooks that US Integrity works with globally. Approximately half of these alerts are related to major sports leagues in North America. The size of the percentage varies depending on the league and season. Almost half of alerts result in a ban or suspension of the person involved in the violation. Some may lead to arrest.
What does a sportsbook do?
Sportsbooks like DraftKings and FanDuel and leagues like the NBA work with US Integrity. FanDuel, which operates mobile sports betting across the country, has a global risk and trading team that looks for line movements that may be out of the norm and raises flags that indicate U.S. integrity. Sportsbooks work with professional sports leagues when investigating unusual bets. In some cases, if a sportsbook becomes concerned about certain lines that have been flagged, they may halt those betting markets. That also happened at Temple earlier this month.
(Photo: Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
