BOSTON – Betting in sports has never been more relevant, especially with one of the more recent betting scandals coming to light, as Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter was banned from the NBA for allegedly placing bets on his own team to lose on three separate occasions.
Bill Speros is a senior betting analyst, and touched on many aspects of sports and gambling, as well as how they tie in with journalism, in his lecture at Emerson College at the SPJ news conference, Friday April 19. The Porter situation is only the latest betting scandal in professional sports, but Speros believes there could be more.
“It’s not going to change anything in terms of the NBA’s relationship with the betting space because the NBA gets $160 million a year from it,” Speros said.
Speros would not surprised if there is one important revision in the future of sports betting: bettors may be unable to gamble on lesser-known or less impactful players.
“You may see limits. I think what’s going to happen is it will probably limit player props to only certain players like your Jayson Tatum’s or your Jaylen Brown’s or your LeBron’s, where you won’t see bets allowed on fringe players or guys on two-way contracts,” Speros said.
Speros said there is evidence gambling in general has been found as far back as 6,000 years ago. Sports betting saw a massive increase in legalization during the depression, because states desperately needed tax revenue.
Eventually, in the 1990s, according to Speros, virtual and online gambling started to take shape, which eventually led to the decision to remove the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, and ultimately leave the decision up to the states. Today, 38 states and Washington DC have legalized sports betting in different ways.
The two most popular states that haven’t legalized sports betting quite yet, Texas and California, are on completely different ends of the spectrum, as Texas is expected to be the next big state to legalize it in some sort of way, and for California, it could be another 20 years before any changes are made, according to Speros and insiders he has spoken with.
Speros admits a number of the story ideas come from sports gambling and journalists have been working to include different types of stories surrounding sports betting.
“You can write about picks, straight up make picks. You could write about where’s the money, like before the Super Bowl. For instance, there was a huge dichotomy between where the professional gamblers were betting their money and where the public was betting its money,” Speros said.
Speros believes the Jontay Porter situation will cause gambling authorities to be on high alert when large bets are placed.
“You’re going to see much more of an alert on, on large, anything that’s not normal, right? Like someone comes in and wants to bet $500,000 in the super bowl, and their money’s clean. They’re going to take that bet, Speros said. “If somebody walks in and says, I’m going to bet $500,000 that Jontay Porter only gets three assists tonight, I’m kicking that guy out of my casino…you know, that’s a red flag if there ever was one.”
Jonny Ratner, Endicott College
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