The NBA now has a second investigation on its hands related to players’ alleged involvement in sports betting setups, and they have one thing in common. In the case of both Jontay Porter last year and now Terry Rozier, the players in question left games early. And in both cases, the sportsbooks flagged serious action on the “Under” for those players’ prop bets.
We know this only because these online sportsbooks removed the prop bet offerings, in which users can wager money on whether or not a player will reach a benchmark in a particular statistical category, before they could cash out.
On Thursday’s episode of Around the Horn on ESPN, host Tony Reali and panelist Bill Barnwell suggested what appears to be an obvious fix: banning prop bets altogether.
“This is a relatively new thing to the sports gambling world,” Barnwell said. “Gambling on sports has been going on as long as there’s been sports, but you could not go to your local bookie 20 years ago and bet on a random player’s ‘Under’ for rebounds in a game.”
Pressed by Reali on whether eliminating prop bets would solve the problem, Barnwell agreed.
“It does seem like the easiest way to resolve this is to remove the Unders on prop bets or remove prop bets altogether,” Barnwell added. “There’s going to be more instances where there are concerns about this happening, whether it actually happens or not until we get to that point.”
“It does seem like the easiest way to resolve this is to remove the Unders on prop bets or remove prop bets altogether.”
Emily Kaplan and Bill Barnwell weigh in on the complexity of the Terry Rozier investigation on ‘Around the Horn’: pic.twitter.com/5O2DoJ92Oa
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) January 30, 2025
In the same segment, NHL reporter Emily Kaplan noted that despite sportsbooks appearing to do the right thing by removing bets that are getting unusual action, these companies also have cover to handle the issues themselves. Kaplan added that just about everyone in sports has a transactional relationship with gambling companies, from athletes to leagues to media companies.
That is partly why nobody heard about the NBA’s investigation into Rozier until a Wall Street Journal story broke the news on Thursday — even though it all happened in 2023.
Many speculated that this was part of the incentive when leagues began striking deals with sportsbooks. When any troubling activity occurred, the leagues would have relationships in place to address it.
However, that also puts the NBA under a microscope here, given that despite its internal investigation not finding any wrongdoing, the U.S. Attorney’s Office is conducting its own.
Barnwell argued that the most simple idea would be to ban these particular bets in search of an actual solution rather than the Whack-A-Mole approach with Porter and Rozier or Calvin Ridley in the NFL. The idea is obvious but would likely garner extreme pushback from gambling operators, given that companies like Underdog Fantasy and PrizePicks are largely built around prop bets.
For years, the argument has been that sports will need to make an example out of someone to root out the problem, but the industry is still waiting for that moment to come.
In the meantime, this idea is as good as any to avoid getting to that point.