The NBA Has Another Gambling Scandal
Which also happens to be the last scandal
(Don’t. Seriously! Don’t.)
((You’re gonna do it, aren’t you? Ugh.))
Scary Terry should be wary.
I’m sorry. It was right there. Until yesterday afternoon, this was going to be a sunny dispatch on the stunning revival of late-stage Russell Westbrook, while we took a week off from the NFL ahead of the Super Bowl. But no! We can’t do that, can we?
We’ve got another point guard we’ve gotta talk about first, because this particular point guard might’ve been point shaving. According to the Wall Street Journal, who first reported on this, the Miami Heat’s Terry Rozier (then with the Charlotte Hornets) is a newly named player that federal prosecutors are now taking a closer look at in the wake of the Jontay Porter scandal.
The (alleged, potential) issue, in short:
“Authorities believe some of the people who arranged for Porter to fix his performance in two games last season had inside information that prompted them to bet large sums of money against Rozier a year earlier.”
Now, to be clear. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Rozier knew there was action on him. It could’ve been that this dastardly cabal of FanDuelists got a tip from someone else that Rozier was nursing an injury and might be hampered. That wouldn’t have had to be Rozier himself tipping them off.
I went and found the game in question, which was a March 2023 game between the Hornets and the Pelicans. And in that box score, one does notice something vaguely Porterian.
Head to the AP game recap, and one discovers something else a bit Porter-esque indeed. (Porterous? Porterine?) He was not listed on the injury report going into the game, but before finishing the first quarter:
“Charlotte guard Terry Rozier left with a sore right foot after scoring 5 points.”1
Just to underline it, this doesn’t amount to hard evidence against Rozier. At this stage, he’s not accused of anything. The NBA says it was alerted to this betting activity at the time, conducted its own investigation, and concluded there had been no violation of league rules.
After exiting that game, Rozier sat out the final eight games of the season with the same injury as the Hornets missed the playoffs. Shutting down veterans under those circumstances is not only not unusual, it might as well be policy.
And yet, people noticed something unusual at the time. Rozier’s stat lines for player props were set at pretty normal levels: 21.5 points, 6 assists, 4 rebounds. But those bets were made unavailable a few hours before the start of the game in question. At the risk of speculating, it now stands to reason that that was probably because of the betting activity the feds are now investigating.
It’s also worth noting, as the WSJ reports, that the watchdog firm that alerted sportsbooks to the unusual activity around Porter only flagged one other NBA game in the entirety of the last two seasons. That’d be this one, ft. Rozier.
We don’t know a whole lot more at this point. What we do know is that Terry Rozier is a far bigger figure in the NBA than Jontay Porter ever was (before, of course, he took on a bigger profile for cheating).
To call him a “Star” is definitely pushing it, but he’s a lot closer than Porter. Most casual NBA fans will know the name. He’s never been an All-Star, but he’s been a 20-PPG scorer in the league. We’re familiar.
And in fairness, having to play for the Hornets could push anyone to consider a life of crime. So if the axe ever does fall on Rozier, may his sentence be lenient.
In some (not all; never all) seriousness, though, what we’ve also known all along is that the broader story of expanded sports betting is almost definitely going to give us more stories like this one. I don’t presume to know that this incident will move the NBA or any other league to reconsider its partnerships with sportsbooks. They took a look at this almost two years ago now, though that was, notably, before any of the Porter stuff went public.
I also imagine they’re willing to accept that some level of foul play is a given, so long as the gambling companies and law enforcement are the ones on the hook to deal with it. If the problems — like this, for instance — are both manageable and not even theirs to manage, then I bet they’re just making sure the checks still cash. Again, these are brand partnerships. Prominent ones. It will take a lot, more than this, to get leagues to step away from them.
However! You’ve gotta figure there’s a line somewhere, and this takes us all another step in that direction. That is not good. That is, rather, bad.
The gambling ring at the center of this investigation is thought to possibly be connected to point-shaving in the college game too, after the same firm that alerted everyone to the NBA action flagged a game between Temple and UAB last march. Temple! UAB!
These guys were betting on the Owls and Blazers, people. What’s that Hunter S. Thompson line? “In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.”
From what I’ve since read on the Porter case, including texts like this (during the game!!!) …
… this crew might be stupid. Stupid enough to bring down the whole industry? That I don’t know. But I’d love to see how the odds have moved.
📺 I helped out on a Search Party video covering the Porter scandal earlier a couple months back — go check that out if you missed it. (And a spoiler for the thumbnail: yeah, he did do it.)
🏀 I like DeAaron Fox, and I hope he lands somewhere that can use him. Still holding out slivers of hope for Zion to somehow land himself in San Antonio, but if that doesn’t happen, Fox and Wemby ain’t a bad combo either.
🔥 More basketball! This Terry Rozier sitch may still not be the weirdest one on the Miami Heat right now. That’d be the Jimmy Butler fiasco, which has, as we all should have expected, gotten worse. Everything I’ve heard suggests that Phoenix remains down. It’s everyone else, who doesn’t want to take on Bradley Beal, that is very much not down. Maybe that resolves itself in the next week or so, but I’m not so sure. Would Memphis Jimmy be fun? Memphis Jimmy could be fun.
And in case you were wondering, Kelly Oubre Jr. also left that game with an injury, but he was not the subject of irregular betting activity and is thus not being investigated. At least as far as I know.