Adam Silver, NBA commissioner Credit: The Paley Center for Media via YouTube
In an unprecedented public gathering of the heads of the nation's top sports leagues, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver on Tuesday made a bold prediction about a topic his colleagues would just as soon sweep under the nearest rug: He believes sports gambling will be legalized in the United States.
Speaking at the Paley Center for Media's "GameChangers" panel, Silver said he thinks the laws that keep sports books quarantined in Nevada and three other states eventually will fall by the wayside.
"My sense is that the law will change in the next few years in the United States, and I think it's not as much a matter of our leagues being for or against sports betting, it's more a function of being realists," Silver said. "It's a multi-hundred-billion-dollar illegal industry and I think ultimately, as the owners of our intellectual property, we're going to embrace it and also make sure that our integrity is protected at the same time."
Silver, who in 1988 earned a degree from the University of Chicago Law School, said that recent events would seem to suggest that the legalization of sports betting may be in the offing. He specifically noted that the U.S. Supreme Court last month agreed to hear New Jersey's appeal in its long-running quest to offer legal sports wagering throughout the Garden State. (Other states that are now setting up their own provisional legislation in the hopes New Jersey gets the five votes it needs to proceed with its gambling vision include New York, Connecticut, Michigan and Maryland.)
While the prospect of the NBA wetting its beak in what is now a wildly lucrative, wholly unregulated economy is likely a contributing factor in Silver's advocacy for legalizing sports gambling, the commish said the practice also does wonders for fan engagement. Citing data the NBA receives from bookmakers that take action on its games in Europe, Silver revealed that 85% of pro hoops bets are "in-play." In other words, rather than simply betting the point spread and then sitting back and watching the game unfold, European bettors are wagering on a constant stream of variables: free throws, quarter scores, three-point shots and every other data point you can think of.
"Independent of whatever revenue stream that may result from licensing our intellectual property to those gaming companies, [gambling] results in enormous additional engagement in fans," Silver said. And say what you will about the moral pitfalls of gambling, but it sure can make what might otherwise be an uninspiring game into a real nail-biter. "You might have a sports fan who's turning off a contest because the game is out of reach for their team or it's a blowout, but here there's a completely independent reason to continue watching," Silver said.
Silver first began vocalizing his support of legalized sports betting in a 2014 editorial that was published in The New York Times. In that piece, Silver encouraged the federal government to allow states to offer a highly regulated form of legitimate wagering, one that would include minimum-age verification and the monitoring of any unusual activity in the betting lines that might indicate the outcome of a game was being manipulated by outside interests.
Silver's colleagues on the dais offered more ambivalent responses to the idea of legalized sports gambling. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said that because most people don't bet on hockey, the propsect of legalized gambling isn't exactly a pressing issue for his league.
"We're a small part of the betting that goes on. Football, basketball, both at the pro and college levels, is where, I don't know, 98% of the betting goes on," Bettman said, before adding that he had some reservations about how legalization could impact the culture of the sport.
"I don't worry about fixing games, I don't worry about anything other than what does [gambling] do to the way young people consume sports," Bettman said. "Do they look at it as a vehicle for healthy competition with role models or do they look at it as a device to make or lose money on a bet? And secondly, what will it do to the environment, in a stadium or in an arena, if everybody is sitting there just worried about their bets? Does it turn us into something other than what we've been, more like either a racetrack or a jai alai fronton?"
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred suggested that legalized gambling would likely serve to intensify the fan experience in the same way DraftKings and FanDuel have demonstrated in recent years. "We were pretty comfortable with the idea that [daily fantasy] was a game of skill and therefore legal, and that's why we became involved in it, and obviously it's a source of fan engagement," Manfred said. "And then you get into actual sports betting, and it seems to me that there's a difference between somebody betting on whether the next pitch is going to be a ball or a strike, which is very hard for anybody to affect or control, as opposed to the outcome of a game, which is a little different."
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was conspicuously silent on the subject, speaking up only once during the gambling portion of the conversation to say he agreed with Manfred's assessment that wagering on point-spreads is obviously a knottier issue than placing micro-bets on pitching counts and other in-game ephemera.
Of course, Goodell and the 32 NFL owners will have plenty of time to mull over the implications of legalized gambling as the Oakland Raiders begin making preliminary plans to shift their base of operations to Las Vegas. The Raiders are expected to move into temporary desert digs in 2019, or just two years after the NHL's expansion team, the Las Vegas Golden Knights, begins repping Sin City this fall. Top-tier sports leagues have had a long-standing aversion to setting up a franchise in Vegas, given the relative ease in which players and officials might be compromised by rubbing elbows with shadowy figures from the underworld. While perhaps not an entirely unwarranted assumption, the anti-Vegas bias never quite managed to explain away why so many pro teams are based in similarly, well, active metropolitan centers such as New York, Northern New Jersey, Boston, Chicago, etc.
The four league bosses addressed a number of other issues during the course of the hour, including the rise of eSports, the rapidly evolving media landscape and how culture is changing the nature of fandom. Each commish was enthusiastic about the emerging eSports marketplace. Silver said the upcoming rollout of the NBA 2K eSports league would serve as a means to promote the game while "developing new content and appearing to a new audience," while Manfred said the MLB "can learn a lot from the demographics of the people who are engaging in this activity."
Bettman joked, however, that the outsized popularity of the pro-videogame hustle was a bit bewildering. "Maybe it's a generational thing, but I don't get tens of thousands of people going to an arena to watch eSports," Bettman said. "But they do it, and we have to make sure we are relevant in all ways possible to young people who are having to choose how they spend their leisure time."
Goodell went on to say that the impact of fantasy sports, if not traditional gambling, continues to make itself manifest in the NFL's Nielsen ratings. "We see it with our television partners; even if your team is out of it, you're going to watch," Goodell said. "It does potentially have a little bit of a negative viewdo they still have the same loyalty to a team they once had? But they used to turn the television set off. Now they're not."
Speaking of ratings, the NFL boss said that the commercial-free RedZone channel "is thankfully not having any effect on our broadcast audience," which is likely a function of its relatively small footprint. It goes without saying that a fully distributed RedZone channel would be a nightmare for advertisers; as Ad Age demonstrated two years ago, a fan who watches all the Sunday NFL games via the ad-free service will have avoided 38 hours and 45 seconds in commercials over the course of the regular season.
If fantasy and gambling go a long way toward reinforcing fan engagement with live sports, lightening the commercial load may also help keep viewers from bowing out during the breaks. As Goodell positioned it, the NFL's decision to trim a few pods from its 2017 broadcasts is part of an ongoing effort to stop giving fans "a reason to turn the channel, or to locate another device." Goodell added that the league would continue to weed out the sort of "dead time" that can make an NFL broadcast stretch well past the three-hour mark.
"Nobody really wants to watch officials running around, figuring out what's going onthey want to watch action," Goodell said. "That's the critical component. How do we make [the games] better and don't give the fan the opportunity to turn the channel?"
If there was a moment when the commissioners acknowledged that the future of sports may be a lot more uncertain than anyone might care to admit, it arrived when the conversation turned to the youngest enthusiasts.
"For all of us, the next generation is different in terms of the way they think about sports," Manfred said. "They don't play sports as much as we did, and you know, the best way to get a fan is to get a kid to play, and so that's a challenge."
The meteoric rise of gaming, social-media and streaming video has played a rather unambiguous role in the development of this less-than-sporty generation, but it's not as if anyone's ever getting that ribbon of toothpaste back in the tube. As much as Goodell was emphatic in asserting that the leagues have to be willing to risk a little self-cannibalization in the service of the fan, the irony of the NFL and the other sports orgs putting so much stock into an emerging market that's leading kids away from the more static pleasures of live sports viewing is hard to overlook.
"One of the problems we all face as an industry is that kids are playing less sports and are, in fact, playing one sport and specializing in that on a year-round basis," Goodell said. "I don't think there's anything worse than that."
The rest is here:
NBA Commish: Legalized Sports Gambling Is a Safe Bet | Media ... - AdAge.com
- Riverside smoke shop raided in suspected gambling and narcotics investigation - The Press-Enterprise - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Sports gambling creates a windfall, but raises questions of integrity here are three lessons from historic sports-betting ... - The Conversation... - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Casino Hubs: 5 Airports That Serve Major Centers Of The Gambling Sector - Simple Flying - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Dear Abby: Dad worries gambling boyfriend will get his hands on money he leaves his daughter - OregonLive - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Jayden Daniels, Malik Nabers cancel NFL Rookie of the Year bet - USA TODAY - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Louis Ferrari expected to plead guilty in gambling ring case - Democrat & Chronicle - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Regulator who ushered in Louisiana gambling expansion resigns, bullish on Shreveport-Bossier - Yahoo Finance - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Alabama's push to legalize gambling dies in the state Senate - Montgomery Advertiser - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Researchers reveal the double-edged-sword effect of overconfidence on gambling - Medical Xpress - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Shohei Ohtani's ex-interpreter agrees to plead guilty in $17M sports gambling scandal - NBC Los Angeles - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Gambling Scandal of Ohtani's Ex-Interpreter to Receive TV Series - Tokyo Weekender - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- The rise of cryptocurrencies in online gambling - The Jerusalem Post - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Tennessee collects $7M in sports gambling taxes on $384.2M in wagers in April - The Center Square - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Key no vote on Alabama gambling bill suggests looking to next year Alabama Reflector - Alabama Reflector - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Effective Messaging Is Needed To Combat Illegal Gambling In US - PlayUSA - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Alabama legislative session adjourns with no final vote on gambling bill - Alabama legislative session adjourns with no ... - Focus Gaming News - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Transnational Crime and Southeast Asia's Gambling Underworld - World Casino Directory - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- MLB Betting Predictions 5/13/24 | MLB Gambling Podcast (Ep. 480) - SGPN - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- How did gambling develop into a major industry in Minnesota? - redlakenationnews.com - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Huge increase in young people 'gambling' on mortgages that expire in retirement - Yahoo News UK - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Premier League Matchday 37 Midweek (Games In Hand) Betting Picks | The EPL Show (Ep. 385) - SGPN - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Best Bet For Monday (May 13th): NBA Predictions - SGPN - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Speaker Ledbetter: 'We're going to see probably an expansion of more - 1819 News - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Gambling goes down in the Alabama Legislature again; union fight nears end; and more on Alabama Politics This Week! - Yellowhammer News - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- OPINION: When it comes to illegal gamblers in casinos, dont ask, dont tell - The Nevada Independent - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- This gambling tech stock might be the safest bet you'll make this year - Stockhouse Publishing - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Professional sport commissioners are fighting to preserve league integrity amid gambling scandals - The Conversation - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- State Sen. Orr: Gambling push 'sucked all the oxygen out' of passing - 1819 News - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Art Rooney II gambling his reputation that change will result in Steelers success - Still Curtain - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- MLB NRFI and YRFI Picks - May 13 - SGPN - May 13th, 2024 [May 13th, 2024]
- Poole Researchers Uncover Tax Costs of Gambling - Poole College of Management - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- Republican Cheryl Bean says casino gambling is not in the cards for Texas - CBS News - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- Local lawmakers, citizens react to the end of the Alabama gambling bill - Fox 10 News - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- MLB commissioner gives update on Shohei Ohtani gambling investigation - USA TODAY - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- As gambling stalemate continues, former governor has suggestions on how it can succeed next year - wvua23.com - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- Better Markets Applauds CFTC's Proposed Ban on Election Gambling To Prevent Election Interference and Protect ... - Better Markets - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- Advocates seeking more revenue for problem gambling in MD will have to wait - Maryland Daily Record - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- West Virginia breaks state record, rakes in $20.68m of revenue in online gambling - WDTV - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- New Regulations For Gambling Consumer Protection Are Here! - Latest Casino Bonuses - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- After gambling standoff, Alabama lawmakers pass $9.3 billion education budget - Alabama Daily News - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- MLB Betting Predictions 5/11/24 | MLB Gambling Podcast (Ep. 479) - SGPN - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- Best Bet For Saturday (May 11th): UFC St. Louis Predictions - SGPN - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- Governor Ivey will not call special session to readdress failed gambling bill - WIAT - CBS42.com - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- Internet gambling industry expected to grow - WDTV - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- Gambling constitutional amendment dies with the Senate declining to - 1819 News - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- Betting on the US market; the IT infrastructure of gambling - DatacenterDynamics - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- MLB's Shohei Ohtani, Interpreter's Gambling Scandal to Be Featured in New TV Series - Bleacher Report - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- Alabama voters are tired of waiting for Godot gambling bill - AL.com - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- MGM National Harbor gambling revenue down 10% - WTOP - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- RIP GAMBLING 2024: House closes session by approving the education - 1819 News - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- The End: The Money Picture Changes with Legalized Gambling - Gobbler Country - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- Real Housewives Of Orange County Castmember Ryan Boyajian Reportedly Caught Up In $16M Theft And Gambling Scandal Surrounding Shohei Ohtanis Former... - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- Gambling Safely: The Importance of Choosing the Righ... - HighstakesDB - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- Shohei Ohtani's former interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, agrees to plead guilty to 2 charges in gambling scandal - Yahoo Sports - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- Charitable gambling to start at Hoops Brewing, will support the Duluth Curling Club - WDIO - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- TV series about Ohtani ex-interpreter gambling scandal in works - The Athletic - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- Sports Is Betting It All On Gambling - Defector - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- MLB NRFI and YRFI Picks - May 11 - SGPN - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- TV Series About Shohei Ohtani Interpreter's Gambling Scandal in Development - Sports Illustrated - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- Why would I do that? Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey says special session on lottery, gambling unlikely - AL.com - May 11th, 2024 [May 11th, 2024]
- Sports betting and gambling addiction are on the rise - Dakota News Now - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- Proposed Alabama gambling legislation includes lottery, casinos, sports betting - AL.com - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- Super Bowl betting soars, but it's still not legal in Chiefs and 49ers home states - NPR - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- Problem gambling has increased in Ohio since sports betting legalized - Hamilton Journal News - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- Sports betting and gambling addiction are on the rise - KTIV Siouxland's News Channel - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- Sports bets during the big game could trigger gambling addictions - 25 News Now - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- Illegal gambling raid at El Patron leads to 1 arrest and 23 citations - KRIS 6 News Corpus Christi - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- Experts discuss responsible gambling ahead of the Super Bowl - Spectrum News 1 - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- Gambling addicts face tough test as Super Bowl 58 descends on Las Vegas and NFL cashes in - USA TODAY - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- What are the NFLs gambling rules for the Super Bowl in Las Vegas? - The Athletic - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- Personal Frontiers gets $45K to treat gambling addiction - Gillette News Record - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- Super Bowl Gambling Grows, But Pastors Are on the Sidelines | News & Reporting - ChristianityToday.com - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- Sports betting leading to increase in gambling addiction - Dayton 24/7 Now - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- Betting on the Super Bowl: Impacts of sports gambling in Ohio as state's help hotline sees jump in calls - WKYC.com - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- Sports gambling during the NFL Championship game will increase addiction rates - 25 News Now - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- Billionaires Are Trying to Bring Casinos and Gambling to Texas - Robb Report - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- Gambling becomes the first big issue of the legislative session - WBHM - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- DraftKings, helplines, and the hidden toll of sports gambling - The Boston Globe - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- The Super Bowl and gambling are locked in a tight and dangerous embrace - The Guardian - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]
- Sports gambling addictions on the rise due to online betting, experts warn ahead of Super Bowl LVIII - WLS-TV - February 11th, 2024 [February 11th, 2024]