MIAMI — As a new season opened this week, NBA teams received their annual league-mandated briefing on the regulations regarding gambling.
Betting in casinos is generally allowed. Betting on other sports, provided it is legal, is also allowed.
Betting on the NBA is not.
For league veterans, it’s the type of training that can seem routine — almost boring, perhaps — but the potential repercussions for breaking the rules are now abundantly clear after Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier were among nearly three dozen people arrested Thursday for what federal law enforcement officials described as their involvement in various illicit gambling activities.
The developments pose an unexpected challenge for a league that hoped to begin its 2025-26 regular season on a strong note, fueled by an opening night game watched by millions as it went into a thrilling double overtime before the Oklahoma City Thunder — the reigning NBA champions — beat the Houston Rockets. There have been amazing performances already: Victor Wembanyama scoring 40 points for the San Antonio Spurs in their opener, reigning league and NBA Finals MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scoring 55 for Oklahoma City in another double-OT win against the Indiana Pacers, Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry and Denver Nuggets forward Aaron Gordon dueling with outstanding individual performances in another game that went to overtime.
Those should be the talk of the league right now. That’s not the case. All that has been overshadowed. Instead, the NBA now faces questions about the pervasiveness of gambling in professional basketball, and uncertainty about what might happen next.
Indiana coach Rick Carlisle, whose Pacers pushed the Thunder to Game 7 in the NBA Finals this past summer, was taken by surprise.
“A shocking day,” said Carlisle, who added that he unsuccessfully tried to connect with Billups to offer support. “This is a very serious situation.”
Rozier, who was arrested in Orlando, Florida, where the Heat opened the season against the host Magic, stands accused of telling an associate he was going to play sparingly in a game on March 23, 2023, when he was with the Charlotte Hornets. Rozier played just less than 10 minutes that night and fell well short of many of the lines set for prop bets regarding his performance.
More than $200,000 worth of wagers were won, federal officials said, based on the information Rozier shared.
Billups — who is in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame for his accomplishments as a player — was arrested in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and charged with being involved in a poker scheme that federal officials said cheated victims out of at least $7 million. Billups was one of 31 people arrested on the poker-related charges, and some of those arrested were, officials said, members of three Mafia crime families.
The indictments for the insider betting and poker cases were separate, but it appears Billups was mentioned, albeit not by name, in the betting one as well. Someone who matches Billups’ resumé — an Oregon resident who played in the NBA from 1997 to 2014 and has been a coach since 2021 — was alleged to have given insider information to someone who used it to craft wagers involving Trail Blazers games in 2023.
That person is described in that document only as Co-Conspirator 8.
Billups and Rozier appeared in court Thursday and are out of the league indefinitely, having been placed on leave by the NBA just hours after their arrests. An attorney for Billups, 49, called his client a “man of integrity,” while a lawyer for Rozier, 31, said the player is “not a gambler” and “looks forward to winning this fight.”
In a statement released Thursday, the NBA said it takes “these allegations with the utmost seriousness, and the integrity of our game remains our top priority.”
Yet betting has become big business for the NBA, as it has with virtually all pro leagues in this era where sports wagering is legal in much of the country. The practice is allowed in some form in 38 states now. Missouri will join that list later this year, and it’s also permitted in the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
“It’s a world that’s a different world than it was a few years ago with the advent of legalized gambling,” Carlisle noted.
Some leaders in the league encouraged the growth of legalized gambling. In 2014, NBA commissioner Adam Silver wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times noting a “thriving underground business” of illegal sports gambling that “operates free from regulation or oversight.” He called for a “different approach.”
A 2018 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately cleared the way for the modern era of legalized sports gambling. The NBA currently has two official gaming partners, DraftKings and FanDuel, and the league has relationships with at least 12 authorized gaming operators. There is even a portion of the NBA’s website devoted to gambling, called NBABet.
As legalized gambling has taken off, Silver has expressed some worries about the implications.
“Obviously, I’m very concerned if there’s any illegal activity going on in our league,” he said in July. “But I’d say similar to the way a public financial market works, the fact that there might be insider trading doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to shut down those public markets. Often the way they are catching insider traders is because they have a system, a complex system, that detects aberrational behavior.”
“But,” he added, “anybody in this league, any player who engages in that activity, there’s no question they are putting their livelihood at risk.”
Golden State coach Steve Kerr said an unfortunate reality for players and coaches in this betting era is that fans reach out — often angrily, sometimes while sitting courtside — to complain that this or that happened and they lost their bet or parlay. Kerr has even received emails from people who want to complain about how they believe he has personally cost them money.
“Our guys get nasty social media posts from people who have bet on games,” Kerr said. “And that’s the thing that I don’t like about this the most. Our players should not have to deal with that, but they do. … It’s just kind of the modern life.”
Boston Celtics forward Jaylen Brown, a vice president of the National Basketball Players Association, said Friday that he doesn’t believe players were taken into appropriate consideration when sports gambling became more mainstream.
“We don’t benefit from any of the profits or anything like that, but we’ve got to deal with a lot of the extra negativity and scrutiny behind all the gambling stuff,” Brown said. “On top of that, it creates more integrity issues, etc. So I’m not sure what the answer is going forward.”
It should be noted that players, through the collective bargaining agreement, do benefit from sponsor agreements the NBA has, including the ones with sportsbook operators such as DraftKings and FanDuel.
Billups’ arrest hit home for the Nuggets. Rodney Billups, Chauncey’s brother, is a member of Denver’s coaching staff.
Michael Porter Jr. was a forward with the Nuggets in 2024 when his brother Jontay Porter, who was playing for the Toronto Raptors at the time, was banned for life after a league probe found he disclosed confidential information to sports bettors and wagered on games — sometimes even betting on the Raptors to lose.
There have been other probes since, none quite like what the NBA finds itself dealing with now.
Said Nuggets coach David Adelman: “This is not how we want to start the season in the NBA.”