And now that probe may be continuing to expand into a player with $60 million in career earnings and multiple stops on his NBA tour, as federal authorities are investigating Detroit Pistons guard and impending free agent Malik Beasley on allegations of gambling related to NBA games and prop bets. A gambling industry source told ESPN’s David Purdum that “At least one prominent US sportsbook detected unusually heavy betting interest on Beasley’s statistics beginning around January 2024” when he played for the Milwaukee Bucks.
There is clearly some shadiness that occurred in games from the 2023-24 season, as it has resulted in a federal probe and a lifetime ban for at least one player. The NBA’s regular season has long been regarded as something of a joke, going back even well before the days of Tim Duncan’s “DNP – old” designations from San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich. It’s an open secret that the league looks at the regular season as an exhibition-esque slog that is too long and played very differently from playoff basketball, and at this point, it’s fair to question whether that mindset has collided with gambling to create the NBA’s worst nightmare.
Now it should be made clear that an investigation is not equitable to guilt, and Beasley and Rozier have had no formal punishment nor charges made against them and are innocent in the eyes of the law right now. This is a federal probe, but the fact that it stems from someone the NBA suspended for life gives it a pretty serious veneer. The fear of what could have happened and what may be happening across the NBA is clear at this point given the direction of the investigation: players either betting on prop bets themselves or giving people inside information to make money on prop bets with the evidence of it lying in lines that looked to be warped by large bets.
Whether a team wins or loses or covers the spread is beyond the control of any one player, but their own statistics are another thing entirely. Wilt Chamberlain famously decided he wanted to lead the league in assists, and he did so after he made a point to start passing more, especially to talented catch and shooters like Hal Greer. Now imagine this dynamic applied to someone wanting to hit the over on their DraftKings assist total being advertised on the ESPN broadcast, and it’s not difficult to see how this could become an epidemic in a regular season that many don’t take that seriously in the first place.
Unchecked greed is becoming something of a challenge to sports’ core business model of putting on athletic competitions that matter. The tsunami of gambling ads across all sports broadcasts has brought the existential threat to sports right into the heart of the games, and now from the broadcast’s standpoint, gambling on games is just part of the viewing experience. The NBA wants this, they just don’t want their players to participate in it, lest they bring the whole profitable enterprise crashing down once it reaches its logical end. This firewall is an unrealistic expectation, as demonstrated by this growing federal probe.
The NBA owners’ combined greed of forcing ever more regular season games on players who say their bodies cannot handle it (while the injury report backs that assertion up) while intertwining gambling to every part of the game has brought us to a moment where the implications are pretty straightforward and pretty stark. If players feel like they are being put in danger to play games that most players did not take seriously long before this new marriage with gambling, and there is now an entire ecosystem explicitly endorsed by the NBA to gamble on their statistics, why wouldn’t they try to make a little extra cash for themselves or their friends by influencing their own statistics?
This isn’t about throwing games, but grabbing an extra rebound, or not. Which in a way, is a bigger existential threat to the NBA’s product than something akin to the 1919 Black Sox scandal. At least there the outcome of the World Series was central to the bets they were trying to win by intentionally losing, but the direction this federal probe has gone essentially renders the games meaningless–nothing more than pure exhibitions of shooting and passing designed for millionaires to rack up certain statistics to benefit bettors. The pure nihilism of sports gambling realized inside of American sports’ least respected regular season is now threatening to become a much starker part of the NBA’s reality.
This was inevitable, and the NHL, MLB and NFL are kidding themselves if they think this federal probe couldn’t someday wind up in their backyards either (especially MLB where the Feds have already ensnared the game’s greatest player’s translator in a gambling probe). The NBA is not special in this regard, they just happen to currently have the Feds’ attention. Prop bets are a serious threat to the integrity of athletic contests, as it provides a clear number for a player to chase outside the context of even trying to win or lose. It regards the entire ethos of sports, a true meritocratic endeavor designed to produce a winner and a loser, as immaterial to the real goal of making more money. This is where much of sports is headed in 2025, to varying degrees of acceptability.
Everywhere you look, it’s the same problem. The elite who control this modern age have set up an economic incentive structure where greed is their North Star, and it has unleashed a wave of abject misery and nihilism on society. Greed has no need for our basic humanity past how it can exploit it for profit, and sports’ embrace of gambling has set its inherent humanity on a collision course with the logical conclusion of this greed. It seems inevitable that the 1919 Black Sox will have some ignominious company in some league soon, likely driven by the age of prop bets and same game parlays being advertised next to players who may be influencing those bets more than the game itself.
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