From the moment the United States Supreme Court opened the floodgates in 2018 for state-by-state legalized sports wagering, it was inevitable that a sports-wagering scandal would attract the attention of the United States Congress.
That moment has arrived, thanks to last week’s sweeping indictment that ensnared the NBA.
Via David Purdum of ESPN.com, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation sent a letter on Monday to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver seeking information regarding the league’s gambling policies and gambling investigations.
“The integrity of NBA games must be trustworthy and free from the influence of organized crime or gambling-related activity,” the letter explained. “Sports betting scandals like this one may lead the American public to assume that all sports are corrupt.”
The committee wants documents regarding, among other things, investigations of players, coaches, employees, or owners since 2020 — and specifically the internal investigation that cleared Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, before he was indicted five days ago for conspiracy to commit wire fraud based on an alleged scheme to rig the “unders” in his prop bets.
“This Committee needs to understand the specifics of the NBA’s investigation and why Rozier was cleared to continue playing basketball,” the letter added.
The NBA’s investigation found “insufficient evidence” of wrongdoing by Rozier. And the NBA (like every self-regulated sports league) had a natural incentive to not announce to the world the existence of internal issues regarding the misuse of inside information.
Congress has broad power to create laws that would regulate the leagues, up to and including the creation of an agency that would actively oversee professional sports. It could be similar to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was established five years after the stock market crash of 1929 to restrict and ideally eliminate insider trading.
For sports, everyone now realizes that the same type of material, non-public information can be misused and abused. And the end result could be a set of new laws creating clear prohibitions against providing to outsiders any and all information that could be used to gain an improper advantage in the ever-growing industry of legalized and normalized sports betting.
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