On Tuesday, Oct. 21, the NBA enjoyed a dramatic opening night, with the Houston Rockets taking the Oklahoma City Thunder to a double-overtime thriller before eventually falling to the reigning MVP and world champion Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and company. After signing an 11-year, $76 billion deal with ESPN, NBC and Amazon, the NBA enters its 80th season with lofty expectations for competition and entertainment. While the opening week of play did not disappoint, the league’s competition was overshadowed by its biggest gambling scandal in decades, involving multiple indictments, federal agencies, mafia activity and illicit poker games.
In the eye of the storm is Portland Trail Blazers Head Coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat Guard Terry Rozier. The two well-known basketball names are involved in independent but connected ordeals, and were arrested on Thursday, Oct. 20, alongside about 30 other defendants involved in various gambling-related charges. Billups and Rozier have each been placed on leave from their respective teams.
The story starts in 2019 with the first cited poker games involving Billups and the Bonanno, Gambino and Genovese crime families. The group allegedly defrauded victims out of over $50,000 using rigged card shuffling machines. Over the course of the games cited, Billups and the Cosa Nostra crime families allegedly cheated gamblers out of over $7 million.
In 2022, Rozier enters the frame. Investigators allege that in December 2022, Rozier began distributing nonpublic information about the details of basketball games in return for payment.
A man named Marves Fairley bridges the gap between Billups’ poker games and Rozier’s information leaking. In early 2023, indictments allege that Rozier informed co-defendant Deniro Laster that he would be prematurely removing himself from a game against the New Orleans Pelicans. Laster then allegedly sold this information to Fairley for hundreds of thousands of dollars of gambling winnings. Fairley also sold the information to a network of gamblers, prompting over $260,000 in wagers on various prop bets banking on Rozier underperforming in different statistical categories. This kind of anomalous behavior raises flags for investigators looking for unusual betting patterns. An individual NBA player prop will usually elicit $5,000 to $10,000 of gambling action, so outliers like Rozier’s are sure to attract investigators’ attention.
The situation itself is paradoxical, calling into question the relative value of money for high-earning professional athletes. Joseph Nocella, the top federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of New York, called the whole ordeal “one of the most brazen corruption schemes since online sports betting became widely legalized in the United States,” (AP). Billups and Rozier gambled with their careers and are suffering their consequences. Billups was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame last year and made about $106 million over his 17-year career, and Rozier summed about $160 million over his time in the league, monumental sums compared to the money garnered from their alleged illicit gambling schemes.
The NBA has dealt with gambling scandals in the past, and in each instance, the punishment has been swift and severe. In the early 2000s, referee Tim Donaghey was caught fixing games. The disgraced referee would bet on games and sell inside information to the New York Cosa Nostra crime families about which team he was going to help win. Donaghey was sentenced to 15 months in prison, but the NBA wanted more. The league demanded that Donaghey reimburse them for the costs of his airfare, meals, complimentary game tickets and other expenses during his time as a referee. Commissioner David Stern then implemented sweeping changes to the NBA’s vetting process and monitoring of referees.
In another incident in 2024, Commissioner Adam Silver banned Toronto Raptors Forward-Center Jontay Porter for life for passing inside information to gamblers and for betting against his own team. This marked the first time a player was banned from the league for gambling since 1954. Again, the gambling scandal incited a wake-up call for the league: Adam Silver quickly implemented the “Jontay Porter Rule,” which forbade sportsbooks from including unders on player props who are on either two-way contracts or 10-day contracts.
As the NBA opens yet another dark chapter where gambling and the game of basketball intersect, the case will become a landmark moment in how leagues, sportsbooks and regulators respond to corruption in a time of exploding access to betting. With online sports betting continuing to grow, the major sports leagues have integrated gambling directly into broadcasts and mobile apps, eroding the line between gambling and the game. The Billups and Rozier scandal is more than an isolated incident; it is a warning for every league navigating this new landscape. How Adam Silver and the NBA respond will set the tone for the future of integrity in professional sports.