Gambling scandal roils the NBA

The arrests of two well-known NBA figures Thursday as part of a nationwide federal investigation into inside gambling and high-tech poker fraud — particularly a sitting head coach and a former Finals MVP — shook the league, from players to front offices to agents, sources told NBC News.

The arrests, particularly that of Hall of Famer and Portland head coach Chauncey Billups, changed the tenor of this week’s conversations around the NBA, whose new season had begun only two days earlier.

The mood, said one team’s front office official, shifted from fanfare to “fear.”

“Who else is involved?” » declared the executive. “It’s a nightmare for the league.”

Reactions to the extraordinary news spread quickly, ranging from surprise to anger at the league itself, according to five people who work within or closely with the NBA, all of whom were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the subject.

“I’m surprised they got caught,” one player agent said. “But I’m not surprised, because [gambling] It’s happening everywhere.”

Terry Rozier has been indicted as part of an investigation into insider sports betting. A separate investigation into what law enforcement officials described as rigged poker games run by the Mafia led to charges against Billups. Jones was named in both indictments.

“Shocking day,” Indiana Pacers coach Rick Carlisle, who is also president of the National Basketball Coaches Association, said Thursday before a game. Carlisle said he contacted Billups and his representatives to ask how Billups was doing, but did not hear back.

“It’s a very serious situation,” Carlisle said. “The irony, I guess, from my perspective is that yesterday was a day where our general counsel came and read us all the gambling regulations and warned our coaching staff, our players, our support staff about all these different things.”

Billups’ attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

Jones, in addition to rigged poker games, was also accused of leaking inside information to bettors about a player’s injury status before a game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Milwaukee Bucks in February 2023. That player was LeBron James, according to multiple reports, although he is not named in the indictment or accused of wrongdoing. Jones was also accused of telling the same bettors on January 15, 2024 that another Lakers player would miss the game due to injury, before that information was made public. The only player matching the description in the indictment is Anthony Davis.

Billups, although not named in Rozier’s indictment, was apparently implicated. The indictment refers to an individual named “Co-Conspirator 8,” who is described as an Oregon resident who played in the NBA from 1997 to 2014 and has been a coach since 2021. (Billups was drafted in 1997 and last played in 2014, and he became head coach in 2021.)

Co-Conspirator 8 is accused of giving bettors inside information about a Trail Blazers game in March 2023, when Billups was their head coach. Co-Conspirator 8 allegedly told another defendant in the case that Portland would “tank” the game and that several players on the team would be injured. Other defendants in this case allegedly used this information to place bets against the Trail Blazers.

The “fear” of potential fallout or expansion of investigations came after FBI Director Kash Patel said at a news conference that gambling investigations were continuing and Christopher Reya, FBI assistant director in charge of the New York field office, called the indictments “just the tip of the iceberg.”

The league has faced gambling scandals before. Jontay Porter of the Toronto Raptors was banned for life last year for violating the league’s gambling rules after a league investigation determined he leaked information about his stake to bettors for profit. He later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in federal court and is scheduled to be sentenced in December.

Last season, the NBA said in a statement that it was aware of an investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office regarding Rozier.

A gambling culture has existed in the NBA for years, several people said. In the locker room, it is not uncommon to hear discussions about a recent game of poker or drunk, a card game that resembles spades and is popular among basketball players. One longtime team employee said the betting and the competition that fueled it was so pervasive that almost every team flight he was on had multiple big-money games happening at the same time, often one between players and another between coaches.

JJ Redick, the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, who also played in the league for 15 years, once told a story on his podcast where he almost came to blows with a teammate over gambling. After calling drunken “the best game of chance” because of how the pot can grow “exponentially,” Redick said that “the closest I’ve gotten never been about a teammate hitting me” was during a card game on a team flight.

In January 2010, former All-Star Gilbert Arenas was arrested in violation of gun control laws after he and teammate, Javaris Crittenton, brought guns into the Washington Wizards locker room following a gambling dispute. Arenas has since said the argument started over a drunken game. (Arenas avoided prison but was sentenced to two years of supervised probation in that case.)

A league source told NBC News that it’s not uncommon for players to separate themselves into different groups based on their salary. A young player, for example, can’t play right away with a superstar on a max contract. But as salaries have risen in the NBA — the league’s highest-paid player will earn more than $59 million this season — the stakes on team steals have only grown.

Aside from flights, players often set up shop or are invited to high-stakes poker games, with cities like Los Angeles and Houston cited as being popular with players, according to one source. (Arenas was arrested in July as part of a separate Justice Department investigation into illegal poker gambling in the Los Angeles area. He has pleaded not guilty.)

Redick, who has coached the Lakers since 2024, told reporters Thursday that the team held meetings that day about the league’s anti-gambling rules.

“It’s obviously everyone’s concern,” Redick said.

Although gambling and the NBA have long been intertwined, Thursday’s arrests put the league on a different kind of alert, one agent said, because they involved not lower-level players, but Rozier, who has earned more than $150 million during his career, and someone with the stature of Billups, a former NBA Finals MVP who has been inducted into the Hall of Naismith’s basketball fame only last year and is widely respected around the league. The Trail Blazers deferred comment to the NBA and announced that an assistant coach, Tiago Splitter, would assume head coaching responsibilities.

The NBA first investigated Rozier after being alerted in March 2023 to what a league spokesperson later said was unusual betting activity related to his performance. Such bets on individual events during games, and not on the outcomes of the games themselves – called “prop bets” – have become extremely popular. Concerned that such bets could also incentivize players to manipulate their performance for financial gain after Porter’s banishment last year, the NBA last year persuaded sportsbooks to no longer offer “under” bets for players on 10-day or two-way contracts, who typically earn the least money.

Rozier’s attorney, Jim Trusty, told NBC News on Thursday that Rozier had been “cleared by the NBA.” However, the league never went that far publicly, only stating in January 2024 that its investigation “did not reveal a violation of NBA rules.”

Asked at a July news conference about the NBA’s investigation and whether he was comfortable with the findings, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver acknowledged that federal investigators “have more resources at their disposal than the league office when we’re conducting an investigation.”

However, as many interpreted Rozier as having been cleared by the league, only to later be arrested, a high-ranking team executive said Thursday that he was concerned that “people are losing confidence in the NBA’s ability to investigate these things.” The executive added that he, too, had become skeptical of the results the NBA’s investigative arm might draw from probes it handles or outsources to outside law firms, such as the ongoing investigation into whether the Los Angeles Clippers circumvented the salary cap.

“This is not about Terry Rozier or Chauncey Billups,” the executive said. “We trust the NBA to maintain the integrity of what happens on the basketball court.”

The NBA said in a statement Thursday that it continues to review the federal indictments and allegations, which it takes “with the utmost seriousness.”

Billups was arrested less than nine hours after Portland’s home loss, a game attended by the team’s current owner and a financier in the process of buying the franchise. Billups was asked if the change in ownership had added pressure to his job.

“I do my best,” he said, “and I let the chips fall where they may.”