The Sports-Betting Disaster

It’s never been this easy for a player to fix the outcome of a bet. For the seventy years that legal sports betting was confined to Nevada, most of the action focussed on which teams would win or at least cover the point spread. Las Vegas sportsbooks might have offered a few dozen props for a regular-season game—will a quarterback throw for more than two touchdowns, will a batter hit a home run—but these bets were mostly a sideshow. Then, in 2018, when a landmark Supreme Court decision allowed other states to legalize bookmaking, the scope of sports gambling grew exponentially. Online-betting companies such as FanDuel and DraftKings began carving every game into thousands of props, down to the real-time outcome of the next play. This has created a frenetic—and, some say, highly addictive—gambling experience, with many people now exclusively betting on props. It struck Hazan that players and their representatives are privy to inside information that would be valuable to a gambler, even during the off-season. This is because prop bets have expanded beyond individual player stats, and now include things ranging from draft order to end-of-season awards. A few days before I met Hazan, Paul George, the All-Star small forward, had announced he was joining the Philadelphia 76ers. “We knew before free agency started that he was going to the Sixers,” Hazan told me. He cited the 2021 draft as another example: well before draft night, Oklahoma City Thunder executives told Hazan that they intended to take his client Tre Mann with the eighteenth pick. “I could have bet that,” Hazan said. When I first spoke with Hazan, in 2024, one of his top clients was Malik Beasley, a sharpshooting guard who had just signed a one-year deal with the Detroit Pistons. Hazan mentioned him as an example of how difficult it’s become for athletes to block out gambling. In 2023, when Beasley played for the Milwaukee Bucks, he drained a ridiculous three-pointer off one leg in the final seconds of a game against the Boston Celtics. The basket didn’t affect the outcome—the Bucks lost by three points—but it mattered a great deal to anyone who wagered on Boston to cover the five-and-a-half point spread, and, all over social media, Beasley got destroyed for taking the shot, Hazan said. (This is only a mild example of the kind of harassment that sports professionals are suffering: Beasley’s coach in Detroit, J. B. Bickerstaff, has received texts from angry gamblers claiming to know his home address and threatening his children.) The season after Hazan shared his concerns with me, Beasley had a career year, finishing second in the league in three-pointers made and emerging as a finalist for the league’s Sixth Man of the Year award. This past summer, the Pistons reportedly planned to re-sign him on a forty-two-million-dollar, three-year contract, until the N.B.A. alerted the team that Beasley was under federal investigation for gambling. Detroit halted negotiations, and, although Beasley’s attorneys say he’s no longer the target of a federal probe, the N.B.A. continues to investigate separately, and his career remains in limbo. Some people think today’s pro athletes are too wealthy to be corrupted. Beasley has made nearly sixty million dollars in his N.B.A. career. But he’s also been sued for unpaid bills, in recent years, by his Detroit apartment’s landlord, a dentist, and his barber. After he split with Hazan earlier this year, Hazan’s agency sued him for failing to pay back a six-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar advance. (Beasley declined to comment.) It’s much harder, at least until more details emerge, to fathom what might have compelled Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier to get caught up in gambling. Rozier has made a hundred and sixty million dollars over ten years playing in the N.B.A., but last Thursday, the morning after the Heat’s first game of the season, the F.B.I. arrested Rozier, charging him with altering his performance in collusion with a childhood friend and other gamblers. Rozier denies any wrongdoing. In March, 2023, sportsbooks had flagged a flurry of wagering—totalling more than two hundred thousand dollars—that Rozier would finish “under” his prop betting line for points, rebounds, and assists during a regular-season game against the New Orleans Pelicans. That night, Rozier removed himself just under ten minutes into the game, saying he’d hurt his foot. The indictment claims that gamblers also bet on six other N.B.A. games using inside information funnelled from sources throughout the league, including a former player, Damon Jones, who allegedly tipped gamblers that LeBron James would be missing a Los Angeles Lakers game with an injury before that news became public. (Jones could not be reached for comment.) On the same day, more than thirty people were charged in a separate probe, including the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, Chauncey Billups, for alleged involvement in rigged, mob-run poker games. Billups also allegedly tipped gamblers that several key players on the Trail Blazers would be sitting out one game. Billups maintains his innocence. The probes encompass tens of millions of dollars in fraud and, according to the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, are “very much ongoing.” Rozier is likely the highest-profile athlete in the legal-betting era to be suspected of wagering on himself, but he likely won’t be the last. As Hazan and many others inside professional and college sports told me, the leagues can’t possibly stop every player, coach, and referee from betting. Days after the investigation into Beasley came to light, in late June, Luis Ortiz, a pitcher on the Cleveland Guardians, was placed on “nondisciplinary paid leave” as Major League Baseball investigated whether he, too, bet on himself. A few weeks later, Ortiz’s teammate, the All-Star closer Emmanuel Clase, was placed on leave over similar allegations. (Neither could be reached for comment.) Last month, the N.C.A.A. declared three college basketball players permanently ineligible for altering their performance to manipulate bets, and said that a further thirteen former players were under investigation. The leagues continue to say that the legalization of gambling actually protects the integrity of sports, making it easier for them to police gambling within their ranks. But as the scandals rack up, this claim has become flimsier, and fans have started to lose faith in the legitimacy of what they’re watching. After the allegations against Rozier surfaced, clips circulated online of his head-scratching blunders in other games, leading to speculation that he’d been fixing games for years. This cynicism inevitably besmirches players, coaches, and referees who have no ties to gambling. Just go on social media and search “rigged” during any game airing on TV. Last week, I tried this on X during the N.B.A.’s opening game of the season, between the Houston Rockets and the defending champion, Oklahoma City Thunder.

“Rockets game is beyond rigged. They won’t let the champs lose.” “Another display of refs sucking and sports probably being rigged.” “NBA on some rigged bullshit.”

This went on and on. As this argument goes, legalization enables leagues to detect suspicious changes in the odds, a potential sign of insider knowledge or fixing. If a football team is a three-point favorite, for example, but then, for no apparent reason, a large sum of money is wagered, driving the line up to five, it’s possible that someone knows the game is rigged. To track suspicious betting, leagues rely on so-called integrity monitors, an industry dominated in the United States by three companies: Sportradar, Genius Sports, and IC360. Those companies only collect granular betting data—such as which accounts are wagering and where those bets are being placed—from regulated sportsbooks. Yet Americans wager tens of billions of dollars every year through offshore bookmakers. This creates a significant blind spot for integrity monitoring—a fact that Jim Brown, who oversees integrity services in North America for Sportradar, conceded when we spoke last year for my forthcoming book on sports gambling. “If you’re a transnational criminal organization,” he said, you’re probably not placing bets on FanDuel. “You’re going to where you can get the most liquidity, where it’s not necessarily highly regulated,” such as foreign bookmakers, or a street bookie. “If it’s a street bookie, it’s really tough to try to identify that.” Still, some players are reckless enough to get caught. Jontay Porter, a benchwarmer on the Toronto Raptors, was banned from the N.B.A. for life after he was discovered to have colluded with gamblers and feigned an injury during two games in 2024. A subsequent federal investigation found that Porter texted his co-conspirators from the arena during a game, instructing them how to bet. The scheme quickly unravelled, after the large bets they placed through FanDuel and DraftKings on a player as marginal as Porter were flagged by integrity monitors. In the indictment, federal investigators said Porter, who eventually pleaded guilty, had accumulated sports-gambling debts, which led to him being extorted by a shady crew of gamblers, including at least one man, (Sugar) Shane Hennen—a convicted cocaine dealer— who is now also accused of colluding with Terry Rozier’s friend. I obtained a screenshot appearing to show one of their betting receipts: an eighty-thousand-dollar parlay on DraftKings involving six “under” props for Porter’s points, rebounds, assists, and other stats, which paid out $1.12 million. Parlays stack multiple bets together for a bigger payday, only if all of them are successful, and online sportsbooks now offer same-game parlays, which mainly combine individual player props. Parlays are exceptionally profitable for the house, netting as much as five times more in revenue than traditional “straight” bets. As a result, online sportsbooks will take huge bets on even the most obscure same-game parlays. When I told Robert Walker, a longtime Nevada bookmaker, about the eighty-thousand-dollar Porter parlay, he said he and his peers would never offer that bet for more than a few hundred dollars—not because they don’t want the profits, but because old-school bookies recognize that fringe players are more prone to corruption. In other words, the type of wager that Porter and his associates tried to exploit is a distinct byproduct of the legal-online-betting era. Nevertheless, the gambling industry held Porter up as evidence that legalization was, indeed, protecting sports from fixers. “Unfortunately, the system is working,” Sara Slane, a former top official at the American Gaming Association, said after Porter was caught. (Years earlier, Slane had been instrumental in persuading the leagues to embrace gambling.) By this logic, gambling advocates can’t lose. When time passes without a scandal, they say it proves fears about legal gambling are overblown. When a player is caught betting, they say, “The system is working.” The Switzerland-based integrity monitor Sportradar, whose clients include the N.B.A., N.H.L., M.L.B., and Nascar, tracks more than thirty billion line movements for nearly a million games every year. In 2023, the company identified thirteen hundred “suspicious” matches, meaning there was a puzzling, dramatic swing in the odds. “Identifying it is the easy part,” a former employee at an integrity monitor told me. Actually investigating whether corruption was involved, and by whom, requires “a significant amount of legwork.” “Are they missing things?” the person asked me. “They may well be.” Many people seem to think the bigger the sporting event, the more attention there will be from regulators, making it harder to manipulate. Declan Hill, an associate professor at the University of New Haven who studies match-fixing, told me the opposite is often true: a six-figure bet would stand out on, say, Division II college basketball, but bookmakers would barely bat an eye at the same bet on an N.F.L. playoff game, nor would it even likely change the odds. It’s an “open secret,” Hill said, that integrity monitors have a much harder time spotting suspicious activity for major games. “We’re talking about ripples in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.” Generally, athletes are prohibited from gambling on their own sport. But what if they simply bet through a friend’s account? “That’s definitely the workaround,” a Las Vegas oddsmaker told me, “and I would say it probably would never get caught.” One might assume that, because pro sports are now scrutinized from every angle, it would be impossible to get away with intentionally underperforming. Moses Swaibu, a low-level English soccer player who was convicted, in 2015, of colluding with gamblers, scoffed at that idea, and told me that pro athletes can change the outcome of a play just by standing a foot out of position. Sportsbooks won’t meaningfully curtail prop offerings without a fight. Those bets have become too essential to their bottom line. They’re also vital to the profits of Sportradar and Genius Sports, which, in addition to providing integrity monitoring, distribute the data used to offer props and even provide bookmaking services. Adding to this potential conflict of interest, the N.B.A. and M.L.B. have invested in Sportradar, while the N.F.L. owns a stake in Genius. When asked to limit prop offerings—especially on “unders” for players other than the biggest stars—the gambling industry claims this would only drive customers to place those bets on the black market. That argument “frankly is bullshit,” another veteran of the integrity-monitoring business told me. Most casual bettors, the veteran explained, won’t take their business to shady offshore sites just to bet the under on someone like Terry Rozier. For companies saying otherwise, “their primary focus is the protection of the betting industry. They would never agree that restriction of betting markets is in the best interest of sports, even though in some cases it quite clearly is.” Given how intertwined integrity monitors are in the business of prop betting, is it possible that they would hesitate before blowing the whistle? Sports leagues, sportsbooks, and integrity monitors are largely responsible for identifying improper gambling within their ranks and, just as importantly, deciding whether to disclose what they find to the public. As Declan Hill put it, “The stated goal of some sports associations is completely at odds with what their actual goal is, which is that nobody knows about fixing. Catching the guys fixing would be great, but their No. 1 goal is to make sure that people don’t know about it.” The same thought had occurred to Daniel Hazan, the N.B.A. agent. Sure, the league had banned Jontay Porter, but he was about as obscure a player as they come. “Imagine if it was an All-Star,” Hazan told me. “That would kill the league. I believe the N.B.A. can’t risk catching a star because if they did, it discredits the whole league, it discredits the morality of the game, it discredits everything.” ♦