NBA's Silver: No regrets on backing legal betting

NEW YORK — “Betting on professional sports is currently illegal in most of the United States outside of Nevada. I believe we need a different approach.”

The upcoming 10th anniversary of NBA commissioner Adam Silver typing those two sentences is significant because those words were part of a movement that changed the sports landscape and brought betting on games — a controversial issue for decades — mainstream.

Those two sentences were the start of an op-ed piece that carried Silver’s byline in The New York Times, first appearing on the newspaper’s website on Nov. 13, 2014, and in the print edition the following day. He wrote the piece himself, not even sure when he started where it was going.

The headline, “Legalize and Regulate Sports Betting,” represented a seismic shift from the NBA’s previous position on the matter. Silver said he was simply trying to start a conversation. A decade later, the NBA has more than two dozen business relationships with gaming companies.

The notion of sports betting isn’t just a conversation anymore. It’s a phenomenon.

“I’d say when it comes to sports betting, I certainly don’t regret writing that op-ed piece and being in favor of legalized sports betting,” Silver said. “I still think you can’t turn the clock back. I think, as I said at the time, with the advent of the internet, widely available sports betting online … that we had to deal directly with technology and recognize that if we don’t legalize sports betting, people are going to find ways to do it illegally.”

Silver’s op-ed did not change the betting landscape on its own, but it helped get the ball rolling. The ball was not moving very quickly at first; nearly four years after writing the op-ed had passed before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal law that barred gambling on sports in most states and gave them the go-ahead to legalize betting.

That law, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, had been in place since 1992 and barred state-authorized sports gambling with some exceptions. It made Nevada the only state where a person could wager on the results of a single game.

In the first four years after PASPA was struck down, Americans legally wagered $125 billion on games.

“I was in favor of a federal framework for sports betting. I still am,” Silver said. “I still think that the hodgepodge of state by state, it makes it more difficult for the league to administer it. I think it creates competition, understandably, among states to get — just think New York, New Jersey or a situation like that where you’re both competing for the same customer so you can compete on tax rates and other things and a regulatory framework.

“I think that on the downsides of sports betting, they certainly exist, and I think we have to pay a lot of attention to that. I think where we’re hearing it in multiple categories, certainly you see incidents of underaged people betting. We have to pay a lot of attention to that, what’s potentially going on at college campuses, certainly people betting over their heads.”

And, as the league got reminded last season, within the NBA as well.

In April, Silver banned Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter from the NBA after a league investigation found he disclosed confidential information to sports bettors and wagered on games, even betting on the Raptors to lose.

Silver called Porter’s actions “blatant” and “a cardinal sin.”

The inquiry into Porter’s actions started once the league learned from “licensed sports betting operators and an organization that monitors legal betting markets” about unusual gambling patterns surrounding Porter’s performance in a game on March 20 against the Sacramento Kings. The league found Porter gave a bettor information about his health status prior to that game and said that another individual, known to be an NBA bettor, placed an $80,000 bet that Porter would not hit the numbers set for him in parlays through an online sportsbook. That bet would have won $1.1 million.

Porter took himself out of that game after less than three minutes, claiming illness, with none of his stats meeting the totals set in the parlay. The $80,000 bet was frozen and not paid out, the league said, and the NBA started an investigation not long afterward.

“We take this very seriously,” Silver said. “As I said sort of day one, it’s not a huge business for us in terms of a revenue stream into the league, but it makes a big difference in engagement. It’s something that people clearly enjoy doing. I’d put it in the category of other things in society that I wouldn’t criminalize them, but on the other hand that you have to heavily regulate them because if there’s not guardrails, people will run afoul and create issues, problems for themselves, potentially for their families or for operations like us.”