Somehow, the NBA has become the league with the wildest discussion about awards voting. And that continued Friday with NBA TV’s Jared Greenberg relaying the news that NBA Awards voters are now officially prohibited from betting on any awards categories during a season where they’re voting:
NEW: NBA Award voters are now officially prohibited from making wagers on NBA Awards categories during any season in which they are voting, per @NBAPR.
— Jared Greenberg (@JaredSGreenberg) August 16, 2024
It’s unclear if an actual incident sparked this or if this was just a common-sense update to present an explicit prohibition on something that should have been relatively obvious to avoid. Indeed, betting on an outcome with insider knowledge and/or impact is generally prohibited by sportsbooks’ policies. It’s also often considered outright illegal (depending on the specifics) and can carry a risk of federal prosecution. And that’s been seen in everything from the Brad Bohannon Alabama baseball scandal to the Jontay Porter/Toronto Raptors one, with both of those producing actual federal charges.
Regardless of whether anything in particular happened here to spark this change, this should, at the very least, further an important conversation about media and betting. And it will definitely add to the conversation about media-voted awards. There have been various warnings about the chances of a media sports betting scandal, including a dive into that by Sean Keeley on this site last December. In that piece, Dr. Brian Moritz, an associate professor at St. Bonaventure University, particularly spotlighted awards as a potential problem, saying, “You add the ability to gamble on award winners [and] hall of famers, and that adds an extra layer of potential ethical ickiness for reporters to navigate.”
Another element worth discussing here is how bizarre the NBA awards voting discussion has been over the past decade. There was always some discussion there, but it used to take a significant backseat to things like Baseball Hall of Fame voting. However, the 2017-signed NBA-NBPA collective bargaining agreement, in particular, heavily worked media-voted awards into what contracts players could be offered (something that continued in the current CBA, signed in 2023).
That produced a lot of fallout. That included team broadcasters (sometimes paid by the team directly) being removed from league-wide awards voting and Paul George specifically having his contract affected by All-NBA voting (although, as we noted at the time, that wasn’t a completely new thing in sports, and wasn’t entirely bad compared to other potential ways that could be decided). A few years later, Fox’s Nick Wright kicked off a kerfuffle with a claim about 2015 NBA Finals MVP Award voting that the NBA debunked, while Maria Taylor (then of ESPN) got in a dustup with many (including Fox’s Doug Gottlieb) over leaving Anthony Davis off her All-NBA ballot, which she called “a clear mistake.”
Since then, we’ve seen many more specific controversies, including Joel Embiid and Jalen Green, both of whom went after voter Bill Simmons over his public comments.
Other controversies have included Kendrick Perkins bringing race into the Nikola Jokić-Giannis Antetokounmpo MVP discussion last year (where Mark Jackson wound up being the only one who actually didn’t vote for Jokić), Andy Larson’s dissenting vote of Walker Kessler (who plays in his market) over Paolo Banchero for the 2023 Rookie of the Year, Perkins giving up his Defensive Player of the Year vote out of annoyance with Rudy Gobert and Marca writer Ignacio “Nacho” Garcia giving Domantas Sabonis a remarkable amount of voting love. And it’s not surprising why some, including ESPN’s Zach Lowe, have opted out of the awards voting entirely, considering all the drama it’s sparking.
The specific betting prohibition here may not actually have a giant effect. This already shouldn’t have been happening (and could pose significant problems from a credibility, gambling, and legal standpoint if it was). It is positive to see something like this actually codified by the organization in charge of the voting rather than left to common sense and/or gambling companies’ rules and/or federal laws. But it is curious why this wasn’t made an official prohibition earlier.
[Jared Greenberg on X/Twitter]