NBA bans Toronto Raptors’ Jontay Porter for life for sports gambling violations
NBA bans Toronto Raptors’ Jontay Porter for life for sports gambling violations
The league found that Porter leaked information about his health to a sports bettor and placed his own wagers via an online betting account.
BY Jay Willis
On Wednesday, NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced that Toronto Raptors center Jontay Porter has been banned for life for multiple gambling-related offenses. For such “blatant violations of our game rules,” Silver said, Porter would receive “the most severe punishment.”
Perhaps the investigation’s most eye-popping finding is that Porter “revealed information about his own health” to a bettor before the Raptors’ game on March 20, which he left early with what the Raptors said was an illness. According to the NBA, a DraftKings user had tried to wager $80,000 that Porter would hit the unders in various statistical categories during that game—a lock, if, hypothetically speaking, you knew that Porter would play just three minutes in it. DraftKings, understandably skeptical of a five-figure bet on a fringe-at-best NBA player, nixed the bet, which would have netted a cool $1.1 million.
Sportsbooks also clocked suspicious betting activity on Porter’s performance (or lack thereof) prior to the Raptors’ game on January 26—a game Porter also left after just a few minutes, also ostensibly for a health-related issue. This strongly suggests that bettors were using inside information gleaned from Porter well before March 20, and the only reason the league caught on is because someone tried to go too big, too fast.
Finally, the investigation found that Porter placed about a dozen bets on NBA games using an associate’s DraftKings account, wagering around $55,000 to net roughly $22,000 in winnings. Porter, a two-way player who spent part of the season with the Raptors’ G League affiliate, apparently didn’t bet on games in which he played, which is, relatively speaking, good. He did, however, bet at least once that the Raptors would lose, which is presumably not the sort of news that would go over well in the locker room.
As I wrote earlier this month, a scandal like this one was the inevitable byproduct of the league’s full-on sprint into the cartoonishly lucrative world of sports betting, which is projected to earn the NBA some $167 million this season. On Wednesday, Silver said all the right things, pledging to “work diligently to safeguard our league and game” and alluding to the need for unspecified regulatory changes. But the league and its partners are making too much money to do much more than punish the proverbial bad apple here, hoping that no other players try anything like what Porter did—or, if they do, that no one finds out.
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