Porter Expulsion Shows Sports Betting Systems Working
There’s a scene in the baseball movie “Eight Men Out” where the World Series-fixing White Sox players were discussing making deals with different bettors and one of them said, “What will they do? Call the cops?”
For over a century, sports gambling outside of Las Vegas lurked in the shadows. Every so often, a scandal arose that shocked the country—CCNY basketball point shaving in the 1950s, stars Alex Karras and Paul Hornung suspended for the 1963 NFL season, NBA ref Tim Donaghy in the 2000s, and, of course, Pete Rose in 1989.
And those don’t include the unknown number of them that weren’t exposed. Want to know how the 1978-79 Boston College point shaving scandal was discovered? Henry Hill—yes, that Henry Hill, the one portrayed by Ray Liotta in the film “Goodfellas”—was interviewed by federal authorities because he was a real gangster when he casually mentioned he had been going to Boston frequently because of the scam. Similarly, Donaghy’s scheme, where he assisted gamblers in picking winners, was uncovered by a New York City organized crime unit’s informant. Without those “lucky” tips, perhaps those stories would have never seen the light of day.
All of this occurred long before the U.S. Supreme Court opened up the sports gambling world to the general public in 2018. Slowly but surely, states, whose eyes popped upon the realization of the potential additional tax revenue, stopped working on trivial matters of healthcare and education so they could impose the minimum regulations on this new cash cow. It started with my home state of New Jersey, but as of February, 38 states plus the District of Columbia have legalized it in some form, 29 of which permit wagering online, according to Forbes.
It took less time for the business to become beyond ubiquitous to the point of exasperation, with every team in every league looking to rake in sponsorship dough through non-stop marketing pitches so that everyday folk, including those prone to addiction, can risk their savings on the outcome of a basketball game. Or they can drill down to something more specific like how a particular player performs that game with a prop bet.
That’s what drew the NBA’s attention to Toronto two-way player Jontay Porter, who was banned from the league on Wednesday for violations related to gambling. According to the NBA’s statement, it was “sports betting sponsors and an organization that monitors legal betting markets” that came forward with the information that led to an investigation.
Porter apparently shared information with a bettor on a March 20 game between the Raptors and the Kings so that the bettor could wager $80,000 that Porter would underperform that night as part of a $1.1 million parlay. Porter played three minutes and said he was sick, which triggered the betting site to freeze the payout.
The investigation also revealed that Porter, using an associate’s online account, bet on 13 NBA games (while he was playing for the Raptors 905 G-League team), including one bet on Toronto to lose. Per the statement, Porter’s net winnings were approximately $22,000.
That’s right, an NBA player who earned about $2.4 million in his career to date, with the possibility of a new contract this summer in free agency, threw it all away for such a paltry reward.
If ever there was a cautionary tale about the perils of such an “enterprise”, its Porter’s. The brother of Denver starter Michael Porter Jr. lost his life’s calling.
I’m not going to suggest that this story will be the last of its kind. College athletics in particular is at grave risk in this new environment, though the proliferation of NIL money can have some deterring effect. Then again, that was always the case, and this forum has zero sympathy for the NCAA and all the adults, including coaches, who conspired to pilfer every cent from the kids playing the games. Whatever happens down the road in this regard, I feel our nation’s universities had it coming.
But even with college betting, the “odds” that criminal activities are exposed are significantly greater now than in the old days when bettors and bookies communicated over the phone and the proceeds were unaccounted for. The transparency from the legal betting system, in Porter’s case, worked.
We live in a new world now, for better and worse.
Publisher’s Note:
After 181 columns in the last 226 days, it’s time for my offseason break. Like the past two years, I’ll still be posting, but more at my leisure. I’ll have stuff on Drafts, free agency, and interesting thoughts as we head into training camps. The archives, as always, are free for you to peruse. Thank you all for reading through the miserable Jets, Nets, and Devils seasons. Hopefully, a better year lays ahead.
Thanks for your dedicated coverage !