NBA commish Adam Silver calls for more gambling regulation

NBA commissioner Adam Silver, the first acting professional league commissioner to come out in support of legalizing sports betting in the United States, said Tuesday that more regulation is needed to reduce opportunities for game manipulation related to gambling and to combat bad fan behavior in arenas, which may stem from losing wagers.

Appearing on “The Pat McAfee Show,” Silver pointed to the NBA’s efforts to reduce betting options on players on two-way contracts. In the summer of 2024, the NBA asked its sportsbook partners to refrain from offering prop bets on players on two-way contracts to underperform, after Jontay Porter, formerly of the Toronto Raptors, was found to have manipulated his performance in multiple games during the 2023-24 season as part of a gambling scheme. Silver banned Porter from the NBA.

“We’ve asked some of our partners to pull back some of the prop bets, especially when they’re on two-way players, guys who don’t have the same stake in the competition, where it’s too easy to manipulate something, which seems otherwise small and inconsequential to the overall score,” said Silver. “We’re trying to put in place — learning as we go and working with the betting companies — some additional control to prevent some of that manipulation.”

Silver said that prop bets also can lead to abuse of players from fans, even in winning efforts.

“It’s often the case that your team wins and a player scores 25 points, but the fan, the bettor, had bet that the player was going to score 28 points or 30 points,” Silver said. “We have to protect the competitors. We want to protect the environment in the arena of people getting out of hand.”

The NBA sent out a memo to teams last week, emphasizing the “need for consistent and vigilant enforcement of the NBA Fan Code of Conduct to deter and address fan misconduct at NBA games and events,” according to a source familiar with the memo.

In 2014, Silver wrote an op-ed in the New York Times calling for a new approach to sports betting, including federal regulation. At the time, state-sponsored sports betting was allowed primarily only in Nevada. Eleven years later, 39 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have launched legal betting markets.

“I think, probably, there should be more regulation, frankly,” Silver told McAfee on Tuesday. “I wish there was federal legislation rather than state by state. I think you’ve got to monitor the amount of promotion, the amount of advertising around it.”

Silver added that the regulated market does allow for more visibility of the bets, who is placing them and from where.

“With this regulated structure of legalized betting, we can monitor it in ways that were unimaginable years ago,” said Silver. “If there’s any aberrational behavior: People betting large numbers who hadn’t historically done so, just opening an account to place bets, or even the geotargeting, we know exactly from where the bets are being placed, very specifically. If you’re in an arena and place a bet, we know you’re in the arena in many cases. We know where in the arena you are when you place that bet.”