AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Earlier today, the FBI arrested multiple people tied to the NBA, including a head coach and a player, in a wide-ranging illegal gambling probe. In recent years, the NBA, like other major sports leagues, has been increasingly deepening its ties with the lucrative sports betting industry. And for more on where today's news fits into the history of sports gambling scandals, we're joined now by Kevin Blackistone. He's a national sports columnist at The Washington Post. Welcome.
KEVIN BLACKISTONE: Thank you.
CHANG: I just want to start out by asking, what was your reaction when you saw the news this morning?
BLACKISTONE: Well, I wasn't surprised, but I was stunned by the details. And those details being the technological advancements that have been made in betting cheating, which was displayed in this story, and also the involvement of the crime families in New York that are, you know, straight out of...
CHANG: Yeah.
BLACKISTONE: ...Straight out of Hollywood.
CHANG: I know. It's like a movie's writing...
BLACKISTONE: Right.
CHANG: ...Itself. But what are, like, the remaining questions you have at this point? 'Cause there's still so much to learn about what's been going on.
BLACKISTONE: Sure. Well, one thing we want to know is how isolated this is. In any given season in the NBA, there are 500, 550 players on the rosters. And so now, in the past few years, we've seen five get busted for gambling. And so how many more are there? We also saw a number of years ago a referee, Tim Donaghy, get busted for helping to throw games for gamblers, and he was sentenced to prison. So are there any referees who are involved in this? So just how widespread or how localized this happens to be.
CHANG: Well, I want to talk more widely about the history of sports betting in this country. Because, you know, in 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a law that prohibited...
BLACKISTONE: Yeah.
CHANG: ...Sports betting in most states, and then sports betting became widely available because you could do it on your phone. You could do it anywhere, right? How has that accessibility changed people's relationship to betting on sports, you think?
BLACKISTONE: Well, you know, oddly, most people who have studied this - economists and sociologists - they really don't draw any line between transparency in the sport and corruption. What they do draw the line between is the money that is available in gambling. And right now, this country is on a collision course with the $1 trillion mark for gambling. That's estimated to be hit in about 2030. So there is so much money out there in gambling that everybody gets attracted to it. And, you know, Las Vegas is a fabulous place where people like to go. And if you think about it, when we report in the news that the Powerball lottery is at some astronomical number...
CHANG: Right.
BLACKISTONE: ...People go out and bet, right?
CHANG: Sure.
BLACKISTONE: If it's reported that it's at $10,000, it doesn't make news, and we can assume that no one's out there. So it's the amount of money that's available, according to experts, that really draws people to gambling. And, you know, sports gambling has been around forever. I mean, you can go back to the ancient Greece Olympics, right?
CHANG: (Laughter).
BLACKISTONE: And you can find...
CHANG: Really?
BLACKISTONE: ...Evidence of it.
CHANG: (Laughter).
BLACKISTONE: Oh, sure. Find...
CHANG: Yeah.
BLACKISTONE: ...Evidence of gambling.
CHANG: What effect do you think these types of scandals have on fans, like on their interest or their trust in the games that they're watching? Is it corrosive, these kinds of scandals?
BLACKISTONE: You know, one would think so, but we haven't seen people turn away from games because of gambling. In fact, we've seen the very opposite. Now that more and more gambling is available - legal gambling is available to fans, it has driven up the interest. And the problem - the real problem for sports is what we have come to call prop bets. That is what has happened in this situation with the NBA. And prop bets are not bets on the outcomes of games, but prop bets are bets on the outcome of individual performances within games.
And so one of the things that Terry Rozier is accused of in this particular case is that he took himself out of games purposely but under the ruse of injury, in order to keep his output for that particular game below that which betters were willing to bet. And that's a real problem. I don't think that you can get the toothpaste back in the tube at this point, but I think gambling really needs to look at getting prop bets out of the game. It's not going to get out of the game on the illegal side, but certainly on the legal side. And when you have ESPN putting up ESPN Bet, FanDuel, all of these huge companies now involved in betting, and so much of it is involved in prop betting, you have created a new avenue for corruption.
CHANG: Kevin Blackistone is a national sports columnist at The Washington Post and a journalism professor at the University of Maryland. Thank you very much.
BLACKISTONE: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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