The NBA’s Jontay Porter scandal reveals just how bad it can—and will—get as gambling dollars flood into sports
In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a decades-old federal ban on sports betting, at last empowering state lawmakers to decide how free their constituents should be to wager their life savings on Jalen Hurts’s first-half rushing total. On the day of the decision, Tulane Law School professor Gabriel Feldman predicted a wave of “gamblization” that would render the American sports landscape unrecognizable. “Fans will become much more focused on gambling than following a team,” he told the New York Times. “It will make every second of every game of every week interesting to fans as it will give everyone something to root for.”
If anything, Feldman’s prognosis was too cautious. Today, betting has become so integral to the fan experience that it’s hard to remember what it was like before, when the industry’s most significant incursion in mainstream sports programming was the occasional cryptic quip about the spread from Al Michaels in the waning moments of Sunday Night Football. Pregame shows now feature talking heads vociferously debating one another’s picks, and broadcast teams fill breaks in the action with helpful updates on live-betting odds from FanDuel and DraftKings. ESPN, the biggest brand in sports media, runs its own sportsbook; so does Fanatics, the sports merchandise behemoth better known for hawking shoddy knit caps. It is impossible to watch a game without suffering through an ad in which a C-list celebrity and a retired athlete offer step-by-step instructions for downloading a casino’s app, promising savvy viewers the power to get rich in just a few well-chosen taps.
By the numbers, the gambling revolution’s impact has been staggering. The handle—the total dollar amount wagered—is approaching $100 billion annually, and by 2026, some analysts think it could hit $20 billion per month. Much of this comes in the form of mobile betting, which means the barrier to entry is now as simple as unlocking a smartphone and thumbing through the lines. “I wish I had a casino gambling hobby,” a man recovering from gambling addiction told Time last year. “You have to leave your house and go to the casino and bet. Now, you can be sitting on the toilet and deposit an infinite amount of money.”
Given the volume of cash that this arrangement dispenses to everyone but the players themselves, it was perhaps inevitable that a scandal involving a player would emerge. Enter Jontay Porter, a backup center for the Toronto Raptors, who has been flagged by the NBA for suspicious activity related to his player props—bets that he’d go over or under a certain number in points, rebounds, or some other statistical category in a given game. On two occasions, one in January and the other in March, Porter exited games early, ostensibly for health-related reasons: an aggravation of an eye injury the first time and an unspecified illness in the second. Since Porter played only four minutes and three minutes, respectively, in these games, the under bets hit by comfortable margins.
As it so happens, on both nights, the under bets on Porter—again, a bench player on a bad team scuffling through a rebuilding season—were among the most profitable wagers across the entire NBA. Most sportsbooks enforce prop limits of a few thousand dollars, but according to ESPN, multiple accounts tried to place five-figure wagers on Porter in the hours before tip-off—numbers that, depending on how the bettor structured their wager, could turn into a six- or even seven-figure payout. Throwing down this much money on the shooting prowess of a guy averaging four-ish points a game is the sort of thing you do only if you have (one) an alarming gambling problem or (two) reason to believe the bet is a sure thing or close to it.
Porter, who has previously dabbled in trading stocks and cryptocurrency, hasn’t played since the story broke in late March, and will remain away from the team while the league looks into these betting irregularities. But Raptors head coach Darko Rajaković told reporters that he’d never had reason to doubt a player’s “honesty” about injuries, an odd phrasing that seems to suggest that Porter pulled himself from the games in question. All the available evidence indicates that someone, somehow, knew in advance that he’d do so.