On Jontay Porter, Player Props, and Game Integrity
An NBA player just got banned for violating the league's gaming rules. What does it mean for legalized gambling?
Yesterday Jontay Porter, a forward for the Toronto Raptors, received a lifetime ban from the NBA for “disclosing confidential information to sports bettors, limiting his own participation in one or more games for betting purposes, and betting on NBA games.” Here is the NBA’s official statement, and here are the facts:
Porter is 24 years old, and earned roughly $2.3 million between 2019 and 2022. His 2023-24 two-way contract with the Raptors was worth around $412,000. (Two-way contracts are for players who participate in both the NBA and G league, the NBA’s minor league equivalent.)
Porter’s older brother is Michael Porter Jr. (MPJ), a star player for the defending NBA champion Denver Nuggets. In 2021 MPJ signed a 5-year, $179 million contract. There’s currently no evidence MPJ knew of his brother’s gambling.
Prior to a Raptors’ game on March 20th, Porter told someone he knew was an NBA bettor about his health status. That bettor informed another bettor, who placed an $80,000 wager which stood to pay $1.1 million if Porter underperformed. Porter left the game in question after just three minutes, claiming he felt ill. Due to unusual wagering activity that bet was frozen, and reported by the sportsbook to the league and an “organization that monitors legal betting markets.”1
Between January and March of this year, Porter used an associate’s online betting account to wager a total of $54,094. None of the bets were on games he played in, although in one instance he bet on his team, the Raptors, to lose.
The NBA prohibits players and employees from wagering on the NBA or its affiliates, such as the WNBA. Wagering on other sports is allowed.
Between 2021 and 2023 Porter owned and operated a VIP account at FanDuel which wagered millions of dollars. Fanduel says none of the wagers were on basketball. At the time, Porter also operated a Discord which provided stocks, crypto and gambling advice for a monthly subscription of $49.99.
A Win for Legalization or Proof of Corruption?
There are two main takes on the situation. On one side are people who blame the NBA and the sportsbooks they’ve promoted. They believe scandals like these are inevitable with betting ads appearing every 7 seconds, and the best way to protect game integrity is to separate sports from gambling.
On the other side are those who believe the ban is proof legalized betting is working well. They argue such scandals would happen regardless, and we should be happy that gambling is now regulated and we can catch the Jontay Porters of the world. After all, if these bets took place on the illegal market they’d never be brought to light.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Player Props and Game Integrity
Of all the problems with legal sports betting, full-scale game integrity issues––where one or more players conspire to fix the outcome of a game, typically guaranteeing a loss––are relatively rare, particularly for major team sports. Contracts and endorsement deals for star athletes are so big that players would be stupid to risk getting caught betting against themselves. While worse players making less money might be bribable, they don’t influence games enough to guarantee a winning bet.
Enter player props. Today’s sportsbooks want users to be able to bet on everything, including individual stats. These “prop” wagers, such as whether someone will go over or under a certain number of assists, can be easily fixed by a single player, and combined via parlays and same-game-parlays to generate large payouts. While stars won’t do this, it’s tempting for players without 8 figure salaries, especially when they have such low stat totals to begin with. Jontay Porter was averaging 14 minutes per game and 3.2 rebounds this season; without the incriminating wager, him playing 3 minutes and getting 2 rebounds on March 20th doesn’t raise any eyebrows.
As Rufus Peabody, the co-founder of Unabated Sports, which provides bettors with tools and resources to improve their betting, put it:
“The US betting landscape has created financial opportunities that simply didn't exist in the past. I'm talking about prop SGPs [same-game-parlays]. A bettor can create huge upside betting against a role player, something that simply wasn't possible before. And for every situation like the Jontay Porter one that gets identified, I would venture to guess there are way more that don't. I don't believe legal sports betting is to blame. I believe the products legal sportsbooks are offering are to blame.”
To their credit, sports leagues aren’t ignoring the player-prop risk to game integrity. Last month the NCAA’s president, Charlie Baker, requested states ban prop bets on college athletes.2 The NBA’s official statement on Porter alluded to future restrictions on prop betting, saying “this matter ... raises important issues about the sufficiency of the regulatory framework currently in place, including the types of bets offered on our games and players."
Jontay Porter and his Friends are Really Dumb
The main problem with patting the NBA and sportsbooks on the back for catching Porter is that it was so obvious. I mean, who the hell is betting that much on Jontay Porter to not record a steal unless they have inside information? The NBA’s report suggests that the $80k same-game-parlay on Porter is what triggered the investigation, and without it they probably wouldn’t have learned about Porter’s personal gambling, or investigated the fact that on January 26th “Jontay Porter under 0.5 three-pointers made” was the most profitable bet by users on Draftkings (this alone should’ve caused an immediate investigation).
Praising investigators for the Porter case is like praising the police for catching a drug dealer advertising cheap heroin around the corner from a precinct. It doesn’t mean they’re bad at their jobs, we just don’t yet know if they’re good.
If Porter and his friends weren’t idiots, they would’ve spread the bets across multiple operators: $5k on Draftkings, $5k on Fanduel, $5k on MGM, etc, and not placed a wager so massive it was guaranteed to get noticed. Sportsbooks rarely consult each other about betting activity, and a $50k payout on Jontay Porter unders would be abnormal but nothing to contact authorities about, especially if the users threw in some similar bets which lost.
Other recent cases where bettors were caught using inside information are similarly stupid. In February, former Alabama baseball coach Brad Bohannon was banned from the NCAA for telling a gambling associate that the team’s starting pitcher wouldn’t be playing. The bettor then tried to wager $100k on the opposing team, and when the MGM sportsbook in Cincinnati limited him to $15k he pleaded with them to bet more, saying the bet was “for sure going to win,” and “if only you guys knew what I knew.” To top it off, the gambler showed sportsbook operators messages from Bohannon, and told them they were from the team’s head coach.
This isn’t to say the NBA doesn’t deserve any credit. The Porter investigation was quick, relatively transparent, and the punishment was harsh. Players now know that even if the NBA is in bed with betting companies, they won’t tolerate match fixing of any kind.
But calling the Jontay Porter case a major victory for regulated sports betting is a bit much, especially when lots of the people saying this are raking in money from legalized gambling. When the league and investigators catch someone who wasn’t a complete idiot, I’ll be more impressed.
While it hasn’t been confirmed, this Tweet from a couple weeks ago claims to be the bet in question, and the numbers align with what the NBA reported yesterday. The bet, shown below, is a same-game-parlay on Draftkings which hinges on Porter recording fewer than 8.5 points, fewer than 4.5 assists, fewer than 1.5 made three pointers and three other “under” props not listed (likely rebounds, steals, and blocks).
This was also due to the increased harassment towards college athletes that player props generated. Player harassment and the degradation of sport are two other problems with the rise of prop betting. Tyrese Haliburton, the star point guard of the Indiana Pacers, told The Athletic last month that player props encourage toxicity among fans, and that “to half the world, I’m just helping them make money on DraftKings … I’m a prop.”