NBA commissioner Adam Silver reflects on his editorial calling for a change to sports betting a decade ago

NEW YORK – “Betting on professional sports is currently illegal in most of the United States except Nevada. I think we need a different approach.”

The upcoming 10th anniversary of NBA Commissioner Adam Silver typing those two sentences is significant because those words were part of a movement that changed the sports landscape and brought betting on games – a controversial topic for decades – into the mainstream.

And those two sentences were the beginning of an editorial featuring Silver’s text in The New York Times, which first appeared on the newspaper’s website on November 13, 2014, and in the print edition the following day. He wrote the piece himself and wasn’t even sure when he started or where it was going.

The headline: “Legalize and Regulate Sports Betting” represented a sea change from the NBA’s previous position on the matter. Silver was simply trying to start a conversation. A decade later, the NBA has more than two dozen relationships with gaming companies.

The term sports betting is no longer a subject of discussion. It’s a phenomenon.

“I would say when it comes to sports betting, I definitely don’t regret writing that op-ed and advocating for the legalization of sports betting,” Silver said. “I still think you can’t turn back the clock. I think, as I said at the time, with the advent of the Internet and the widespread availability of online sports betting… we had to deal head-on with technology and realize that if we don’t legalize sports betting, people will find ways to make it illegal. “

Silver’s comment didn’t single-handedly change the betting landscape, but it’s clear that it helped get the ball rolling. The ball wasn’t moving very fast at first; Nearly four years had passed since the op-ed was written before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal law that banned gambling in football, basketball, baseball and other sports in most states and gave states the green light to legalize sports betting.

That law, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, had been in effect since 1992 and banned state-sanctioned sports betting, with some exceptions. This made Nevada the only state where you could bet on the results of a single game.

In the first four years after PASPA was repealed, Americans legally wagered $125 billion on games.

“I was in favor of a federal framework for sports betting. I still am,” Silver said. “I still think the state-by-state mess makes it harder for the league to manage. I think that understandably creates competition between states – just think of New York, New Jersey or a situation like that where you’re both competing for the same customer, so you can compete on tax rates and other things and a regulatory framework .

“I think there are definitely downsides to sports betting and I think we need to pay a lot of attention to that. I think where we hear it in multiple categories, there are certainly incidents of underage betting. We need to pay close attention to what may be going on on college campuses, and certainly people are betting in over their heads.”

And as the league was remembered last season, even within the NBA.

In April, Silver banned Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter from the NBA for life after a league investigation found he leaked confidential information to sports bettors and bet on games, even on a Raptors loss.

Silver called Porter’s actions “blatant” and “a mortal sin.”

The investigation into Porter’s actions began when the league learned from “licensed sports betting operators and an organization that monitors legal betting markets” of unusual play patterns related to Porter’s performance in a March 20 game against Sacramento. The league found that Porter had provided information about his own health to a bettor before the game and said that another person – known to be an NBA bettor – had placed an $80,000 bet that Porter would be the for He would not reach the winning numbers set in an online sports betting office. This bet would have won $1.1 million.

Porter left the game after less than three minutes, citing illness. None of his stats matched the totals set in the parlay. The $80,000 bet was frozen and not paid out, the league said, and the NBA launched an investigation shortly thereafter.

“We take this very seriously,” Silver said. “As I said on day one, it’s not a big deal for us in terms of revenue stream for the league, but it makes a big difference in engagement. “It’s something people clearly enjoy. I would put it in the category of “other things in society” in that I don’t criminalize them, but on the other hand you have to regulate them heavily because if there are no guardrails, people get into conflict and create problems for themselves, possibly for theirs Families or for companies like us.”