It was supposed to be a morning of reckoning for the NBA of a different sort. The sun would rise and reilluminate the aura still emanating from Victor Wembanyama after his 40-point master class of a season debut on Wednesday night. Basketball’s latest, potentially greatest anomaly had instilled a sense of wonder in an NBA landscape besieged by cynicism. Instead, Thursday morning brought a bombshell from the FBI and Department of Justice that will irrevocably alter the dynamics of trust at every level of the NBA from the top down—in what certainly looks like a watershed moment for the league, directly attributable to its pioneering efforts to embed itself in the legalized sports gambling industry.
Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, and former NBA player and coach Damon Jones were all arrested on Thursday as part of a series of yearslong federal investigations into illegal gambling. The two probes in question came with rather on-the-nose monikers: “Operation Nothing but Net” for illegal sports betting, “Operation Royal Flush” for fraudulent high-stakes poker games backed by numerous mafia families.
The investigation’s tentacles are manifold: Billups was arrested on charges related to rigged poker games; Rozier was arrested on charges connected to illegal sports betting; Jones is one of three defendants charged in both indictments. There are almost assuredly more names to be implicated in the future, and there was a name already implicated in a past investigation. Jontay Porter, who was given a lifetime ban from the NBA in April 2024 for numerous bets placed against himself and his former team, was named as a coconspirator in the betting plot. During the news conference held by FBI Director Kash Patel and U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Joseph Nocella Jr., Nocella himself said that Porter was coerced into the arrangement after being threatened over prior gambling debts.
According to the contents of the sports-betting indictment, Rozier allegedly informed De’Niro Laster, a childhood friend, that he would remove himself from an NBA game by way of a supposed injury in the first quarter of the March 23, 2023, contest between the New Orleans Pelicans and Charlotte Hornets, which would allow Laster to win on any and all under bets placed on Rozier’s player props. (Rozier played less than 10 minutes in that game.) From there, according to the indictment, Laster parlayed the insider knowledge by selling it to a codefendant and coconspirator for roughly $100,000 of their estimated winnings. The knowledge further trickled down to a network of bettors. The verbiage in the document makes it sound like Rozier was just trying to help his good friend make an easy buck on some bets—definitely illegal, but it was Laster who compounded the issue by further disseminating the information. (This is likely the case to be made by Rozier’s lawyer, who stated that his client “is not a gambler” in a statement given to reporter Pablo Torre.) Still, there is gravity to this dishonor falling on Rozier, a 10-year veteran who has earned more than $100 million in his career, as opposed to Porter, who barely made more than $2 million in total. Porter’s low profile made him easy to banish and move on; that’s less tenable for someone who is supposed to make $24.9 million this season.
It looks exponentially worse for Billups and Jones, who, according to the indictment, appeared to be willing pawns (or “face cards” to use the defendants’ terminology) in a calculated effort to defraud poker players in games held across the country looking for an opportunity to play with a future Hall of Famer and, um, Alfred. There’s a layer of nefariousness that goes beyond the marginally better odds that come from insider information—plenty of the bets placed on the games listed in the document did not hit. But the 31 defendants charged in the rigged poker games created the conditions for unequivocal success in their favor.
In 2023, Matt Berkey, the founder of Solve for Why, a poker training academy, recounted a story on his podcast about a series of poker games played in 2019 “all built around Chauncey Billups.” Berkey was told about the game, that it was legit; one scan of the list of people involved was enough for Berkey to call that bluff. “I had some friends who went and played in L.A. and in Vegas, and it obviously was for sure confirmed to be cheated. People who clearly didn’t even know the rules of no-limit Hold ’em are jamming hundreds of big blinds in with a gutty and just drilling it. Only the pros are losing.” The perpetrators allegedly used chip trays bugged with hidden cameras, X-ray tables, special contact lenses and eyeglasses that could detect premarked cards, and a rigged shuffling machine stolen at gunpoint—all to clean out unsuspecting players at the table.
Beyond that, prosecutors say that Jones sold information about the availability of a player (widely presumed to be LeBron James) during the 2022-23 season, when Jones functioned as an “unofficial coach” for the Los Angeles Lakers. Billups was not formally implicated in the sports-betting indictment, but he fits the exact description of “Coconspirator 8,” who tipped information about the Blazers resting all of their starters in a March 24, 2023, game against the Bulls.
All this news comes less than three months after Gilbert Arenas was indicted on charges that he housed a high‑stakes illegal poker ring of his own in his Southern California residence, which similarly was said to involve an organized crime group. The arrests come just one day after the NCAA approved a measure to allow college athletes to bet on professional sports. FanDuel is a sponsor of The Ringer; it operates 15 regional sports networks across the country previously on the brink of bankruptcy. DraftKings was the licensing partner of Torre’s investigative podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out (which has covered the NBA’s various gambling scandals of the past year with dogged rigor) before the podcast migrated to The Athletic. Legalized gambling is the (im)moral fabric of the sports industry today, a sort of parasitic entity inextricable from professional sports writ large, hollowing out the experience under the guise of keeping it alive.
Legalized sports betting may have installed the necessary safeguards and tracking mechanisms to detect these kinds of scandals in real time, but it also presents the ideal conditions and means to act on baser instincts. “That is the by-product of making sports betting as accessible as it’s become—it fuels impulses, which beget more betting,” I wrote in 2024. “You can lock in a bet faster than you can process the consequences. You can’t see the analytical mainframe monitoring every transaction in the country from the parlay builder interface on your phone. You see only the numbers you want to see. It’s not hard to see how people grow addicted.”
There are more questions than answers right now, and there will certainly be more questions to come. For now, let’s run through some of the most pressing ones.
Does the NBA have a credibility issue?
There has been no breathing room the last few weeks for the league, still reeling from the ongoing investigation into whether or not the Clippers engaged in the most egregious salary cap circumvention in NBA history. Thursday’s arrests come just days after Aspiration cofounder Joe Sanberg pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud charges, which may or may not be directly related to how the environmental sustainability company managed a four-year $28 million endorsement deal with Kawhi Leonard. Even still, it doesn’t exactly paint Steve Ballmer’s relationship with the now-bankrupt company as a sound business venture. In one month’s time, the NBA has been bombarded with legitimate reasons to doubt the institution.
Patel declared in Thursday’s news conference that “Operation Nothing but Net” shed light on “the insider trading saga for the NBA.” Rozier’s arrest came just a few months after the NBA had reportedly cleared him of wrongdoing following a league investigation into a suspected betting scheme. The FBI obviously has more power, leverage, and access with regard to how much pressure it can apply during investigations, but at this stage, optics are just as important as reality. It doesn’t not seem like the NBA was hoping to sweep Rozier under the rug.
Porter, Rozier, and Malik Beasley are the three players (that we know of) that have, over the past year and a half, been subject to federal investigation into prohibited sports betting. Every new case, no matter how minor, wears away at the league’s image and trust. Even if Rozier didn’t gamble or profit off his on-court misdeed, faking an injury to alter the outcome of a game or a betting market is still way beyond the realm of acceptability in professional sports.
With that said, the prohibited sports betting that has occurred in the NBA over the past two years feels like more of a blow to institutional faith than it is representative of an actual financial upheaval. The wagers allegedly made by defendants and coconspirators off of under bets for Rozier’s March 23, 2023, game against the Pelicans totaled $259,000 and netted just tens of thousands of dollars in winnings. That’s a mere fraction of the more than $7 million extracted in the poker games. These are crimes of completely different scales as far as damages go. There are some overlapping characters across both indictments, entangling them in ways that aren’t easy to unbind, and it’s hard not to consider the optics of how the two probes seem to lend weight to the other. Their conflation adds up to something that feels like a full-blown crisis in the NBA, even if the most serious offenses have little to do with the league, other than Billups playing the role of celebrity guest among high rollers. It’s chaotic. It’s a lot to process. Maybe that’s by design. In any case, this has been the worst PR to start an NBA season in years, if not decades.
What might be the most immediate ripple effect from this debacle?
In addition to the NBA immediately placing Billups and Rozier on indefinite leave, it isn’t hard to imagine Billups’s face becoming a new Crying Jordan meme for our troubled times, transposed onto any coach who makes a questionable lineup or tactical decision that could plausibly (or not) be construed as a crime against the game. Is this bettable anywhere?
Are there any long-term basketball implications here?
Many of the games cited in the sports-betting indictment involved resting starters late in the season. It truly doesn’t take a genius to surmise that teams out of postseason contention would aim to increase their odds at a better lottery position by resting their starters down the stretch of a season. But given the precedent of Porter’s attempts to manipulate his own value on the prop betting market, the NBA could use this opportunity to check a few boxes at once.
The league has already taken measures to discourage outright tanking, including flattening the odds for the top three. These damning allegations may force the NBA to adopt an even more stringent and timely policy for reporting injuries and availability. While commissioner Adam Silver has been one of the foremost advocates for legalized sports betting over the past decade-plus, including this now-ominous 2014 op-ed in The New York Times, he’s been quite vocal lately about the league’s distaste for prop bets. Might he be able to negotiate for the scaling down of prop bets if it meant betting markets would have more expedient access to player availability decisions? "We've asked some of our partners to pull back some of the prop bets, especially when they're on two-way players, guys who don't have the same stake in the competition, where it's too easy to manipulate something, which seems otherwise small and inconsequential to the overall score," Silver said on The Pat McAfee Show earlier this week, before the indictments. "We're trying to put in place—learning as we go and working with the betting companies—some additional control to prevent some of that manipulation."
Is Silver equipped to handle this debacle?
Silver looked even more pallid than usual under the lights of Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis on Thursday night—the newborn chimera of various investigations surely hammering away at his composure. He was greeted with a rain of boos in Oklahoma City during the ring ceremony on opening night, too. If the David Stern rubric still applied, one might be able to say Silver’s finally made it. But there was a level of kayfabe that Stern embodied; the boos lobbed at Silver felt more earnest. The public needs to be won back. Silver might not be up to the task.
“We are in the process of reviewing the federal indictments announced today,” the league said in a statement. “Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups are being placed on immediate leave from their teams, and we will continue to cooperate with the relevant authorities. We take these allegations with the utmost seriousness, and the integrity of our game remains our top priority.”
Maybe it’s quibbling with semantics, but something about the integrity of our game doesn’t sit quite right.
Because the game is the game. And the game is incredible. Thursday night served up one of the best opening week double-headers we’ve seen in a long time: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander emptying the tank in a double-overtime bout against an Indiana Pacers team that refused to have its season defined by its sidelined cornerstone; the timeless experience of watching Steph Curry’s late-game heroics from 30-plus feet away from the hoop. Amid all the uncertainty, the basketball was very good. So, no, when we’re talking about integrity, we’re not talking about a game. It’s not the integrity of basketball that is under siege, but the NBA as a platform supporting it.
The NBA—richer and more profitable than ever while also currently cornered by various scandals revolving around alleged improper transfers of funds—doesn’t appear to have the wherewithal at the moment to champion the game the way it’s meant to. With an eroded foundation, there are bound to be vulnerabilities, and vulnerabilities foster a breeding ground for potential bad actors. That’s not a basketball problem. It’s something else entirely.
