October 29, 2025·Sports
The NBA’s Heel Turn
Jeremy Radcliffe·article
Welcome to The Zeitgeist from Panoptica Sports, where we weigh in on the sports story of the week.
Despite the ongoing and thrilling World Series between the never-say-die Blue Jays and Shohei Ohtani, the biggest sports story of the moment is unquestionably the NBA gambling scandal. The arrests of TrailBlazers head coach Chauncey Billups and Heat guard Terry Rozier were just the latest unintended consequences of the full-on embrace of gambling by pro sports leagues. Beyond the crazy details about the rigged poker games, Billups was alleged to have provided information to bettors about his plans to rest basically all of his starters in a game late last season, and Rozier took himself out of a game for an "injury" so that his associates could win "unders" on his player prop bets.
This is the most damaging off-court NBA story since the Tim Donaghy referee game-fixing scandal almost 20 years ago, and it should be a bigger story, but the league and the media covering the league are so enmeshed with the online gambling industry (ESPN Bet, FanDuel, Polymarket et al) that it won't be. And at this point, it's becoming apparent that the WWE-ification of the NBA is more than likely viewed as a feature instead of a bug by the league and its owners.
As everything in the world becomes more abstracted and more financialized (see Ben Hunt), and as the degenerate economy (hat tip Howard Lindzon) of day trading and gambling and pornography shows no signs of slowing down, common sense reforms like, I don't know, eliminating the most tempting and easiest to rig type of best, the individual player prop bets, won't even be considered.
Because the only "real" fans left - you know, ones that root for their teams, hometown or otherwise - are aging out anyway, and have you seen that WWE stock price?
Kayfabe!
Further reading:
- Ben Hunt of Epsilon Theory on the abstraction of everything https://www.epsilontheory.com/the-icarus-moment/and the financialization of everything https://www.epsilontheory.com/this-is-water/
- Nate Silver on the NBA gambling scandal: https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-nba-gambling-scandal-explained
- Keith O'Brien of The Atlantic on the danger of prop bets: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/nba-gambling-prop-bets/684679/
