Foul Play – Las Vegas Advisor

Be careful what you wish for, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, you are liable to get it. Silver wanted sports betting and, over the last seven years, has seen the consequences come home to roost in his league. Whereas the NFL cleaned up its sports betting problem (consisting mainly of player stupidity) fairly expeditiously and Major League Baseball comes down like a ton of bricks on offenders, the NBA remains dogged by scandal. (Can you say “Jontay Porter“? We thought so. How about “Malik Beasley“?)

The latest indignity struck last week, while we were down with a nasty flu, so please forgive us for being late to the party, dear readers. It began on Thursday with the news that Portland Jail Blazers, er, Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups had been busted for renegade betting. Terry “Chum” Rozier, who was already under a cloud, was also nabbed. ESPN‘s broadcast outlets were slow to react to the fast-moving story but its print arm was on the case, describing the situation as “part of a pair of wide-ranging investigations related to illegal sports betting and rigged poker games backed by the Mafia.” The federal dragnet swept up 34 people across 11 states.

We’re not going to pull a Steven A. Smith and claim that this is a politically motivated prosecution. We’re taking the FBI at its word, not least because of the Mob angle. One of the strongest reasons for a healthy and legal gambling industry in the United States is to elbow out elements like the Mafia, which still maintains a robust gaming sideline. “The fraud is mind-boggling,” swooned FBI Director Kash Patel. What’s truly mind-blowing is that the scandal entails people worth hundreds of millions of dollars risking it all to pick up tens of millions, often much less than that. No matter how highly some athletes get paid, it seems, they will always be drawn to the dark side of The Force.

To be clear, there are actually two scandals at play, although the feds muddled the issue. On the one hand, you have people like Rozier who allegedly used inside information to rig the betting lines on games. On the other, there is what ESPN described as “a wide-ranging scheme to rig underground poker games that were backed by Mafia families.” That’s where Billups comes in. “We take these allegations with the utmost seriousness, and the integrity of our game remains our top priority,” pearl-clutched the NBA, although integrity has clearly not been Job One. In true sports-commissioner fashion, Silver called for the barn to be bolted … well after the horse had fled. By presiding over this fiasco, Silver has blundered into a situation where federal regulation of sports betting appears likely, if not quite inevitable. Nice going, Adam.

One of the bettors named in the indictments, Shane “Sugar” Hennen, was nabbed in the very nick of time, as he was about to board an overseas flight out of (where else?) Las Vegas, that magnet for renegade bookies. Nor have we seen the last of this case, as LeBron James is alluded to as an un-indicted co-conspirator. Speaking of big fish, the New York City Police Department says “members and associates of the Bonanno, Gambino, Lucchese and Genovese crime families” were involved in the poker scam. Some of the games in which Billups is implicated, however, took place right here in Sin City.

The timing of the bust is terrible for sports in all manner of ways. No only did it coincide with the tipoff of NBA season (and of highly trumpeted coverage by ESPN and Amazon Prime), it also came days after NCAA President Charlie Baker and his association caved to commercial (and monetary) pressures by allowing student athletes to bet. For shame, Charlie. You disappoint us. America clearly has a sports betting problem, which we hope to address in the near future, if not an outright gambling problem and the G-Men have thrown a harsh light on it.

Speaking of gambling and crime, could the overlords of New York State be about to award a casino to a convicted felon? The elephant in the middle of the room that is Bally’s New York is a certain Donald J. Trump. The $4 billion question is: What happens if Bally’s Corp. can’t come up with the $115 million “gaming event fee” (read: kickback) it has pledged to the Trump Organization? $115 million is most of the cash that hard-pressed Bally’s has on hand. If they’re not good for it, does Bally’s Links‘ ownership revert to The Donald? Stands to reason, doesn’t it? And what then? The real estate will have been essentially casino-licensed, putting the Empire State into business with a 34-time felon. Food for thought. We’d say that the prospect of a sitting U.S. president winning a casino license is bizarre in and of itself but, during this particular administration, it looks like the height of normality.

Speaking of Bally’s, Chairman Soo Kim recently announced a construction timeline for Bally’s Las Vegas, beginning ostensibly in April and finishing sometime in 2029. What’s his game? We suspect that forever-insolvent Bally’s is trying to force the hand of reluctant partner Gaming & Leisure Properties Inc. If we don’t miss our guess, Kim is trying to buffalo GLPI just ahead of the third-quarter-earnings reveal, forcing its hand into bankrolling his vaporware. We’ll know later this week.

Gridiron Grumbles: Last Thursday night’s tilt between the Los Angeles Chargers and an uninspired Minnesota Vikings squad was unexceptional, save for the spectacle of referee Clete Blakeman going senile on national TV. What was worth noting was the typically boneheaded decision by Amazon Prime to move the halftime show to a sterile Hollywood studio, in order to promote (irony, anyone?) its new NBA coverage. The Thursday Night Football gang (or “Charissa and her trained animals,” as Al Michaels puts it) feeds off the energy of stadium crowds—and starves without it. Last Thursday’s halftime gang looked uninspired, and sounded flat and lost. Please, Amazon, don’t make this mistake again.