In 2018, the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Murphy vs. The National Collegiate Athletics Association overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (“PAPSA”), which had long banned sports betting in the United States. The NBA supported the PAPSA ban on sports betting for decades due to concerns about the detrimental impact of gambling on the league’s perception as a professional sports organization. Since the monumental shift to legalizing sports gambling, the NBA, enticed by the possibility of increased revenue, has increasingly embraced the sports betting industry as a potential solution to the league’s challenges. While the NBA’s embrace of sports gambling may have facilitated growth in the league’s revenue and viewership, it comes at a substantial price. Relying on the gambling industry for growth sacrifices the perceived integrity of the sport, as fans lose trust in the authenticity of the game when players and referees engage in in-game performance bets and match fixing. League efforts to deter such practices are failing, due in part to the NBA’s contradictory messaging of embracing the financial benefits of the sports betting industry while condemning gambling among players. The league’s goal of securing long term viewership is also jeopardized by young viewers who create connections with the league through the lens of sports betting but may later move on from the league if they shift away from gambling. The NBA’s current success in attracting viewers through various forms of reliance on the sports gambling industry will be unsustainable unless the league can find a way to ensure the fairness and legitimacy of professional basketball.
The NBA’s viewership had been declining for years as its on the court product struggled to compete with the most popular major sports league, the NFL. The NBA even risked falling behind MLB in popularity, as Bobby Burack, a writer for the sports publication OutKick, explained, “‘Has MLB overtaken the NBA as America’s No. 2 league?’…Between attendance, local viewership, and the World Series vs. the NBA Finals, the answer is a resounding yes.” (3). In recent years, however, the NBA’s viewership has grown to new heights. “More than 87 million unique viewers in the United States have watched NBA games so far during the 2025–26 season, marking the league’s highest reach in 15 years…” (Kumar 1). Although sports writer Vishwesha Kumar explains this calculation is somewhat inflated by double counting viewers who use multiple broadcasting platforms, the steady rise in viewership and the NBA’s revenue growth over the past decade is better understood as a result of the league’s reliance on the sports betting industry.
The sports gambling industry has provided the NBA with a steady influx of cash from sponsorships. The sports business journal, Sports Hiatus, reports the league brings in “$1.6 to $1.7 Billion Annually” (Grant 5) from sponsorships. According to Sponsor United, a sports publication, “NBA [gambling] sponsorship revenue reached $1.4 billion in 2023, only 5 years removed from its first official sponsorship” (Dunkest 4). That means sports gambling is now responsible for almost all of the league’s overall sponsorship revenue. This showcases how the NBA’s embrace of sports gambling has provided it with substantial opportunity for monetary gain. This source of revenue has allowed the league to continue to thrive even in the face of declining viewership trends over previous decades.
Beyond sponsorship revenue, sports gambling also provided the NBA with a more direct solution to its declining viewership. That solution comes in the form of a new kind of viewer, one who watches basketball not solely because they are interested in the game as a competitive showcase or to support a particular team but also because they have gambled on the outcome of the event. Former NBA player, Kendrick Perkins, lays out how this model benefits the league: “you wanna do everything in your power to attract eyeballs. And if you have sports betting and the fanbase, and people are betting…this guy is going to get 10+ rebounds, or this guy is going to have under five and a half assists, or whatever the case may be. Guess what? People are going to tune in to the Pacers-Hornets game. It’s all about attracting eyeballs” (qtd. in Sunjic 2). As Perkins describes, these so-called “prop bets,” in which viewers wager on individual players’ statistics or play outcomes, are valuable to the NBA because they motivate viewers to watch games.
Prop bets also motivate people to keep on watching, even through to the end of blowout games where traditionally viewership would have dropped. This highlights another challenge the league faces with maintaining viewership today: shortened attention spans. John Celestand, a sports writer for the Seattle Medium, argues, “Is an 82-game season conducive to how this generation consumes content anymore? Young kids are now addicted to videos called ‘shorts,’…in the times we live in, where folks can barely watch a full game without texting on their phone, scrolling through social media, and/or ordering through DoorDash, nobody is sitting through 82 games for players who skip a third of them” (3). Arguably sports betting counters short attention spans by giving fans another reason to keep watching. But prop bets may not be a true solution to the viewership issues posed by short attention spans if viewers only tune in for a moment or to watch highlights. There is also an inherent contradiction to this argument. Betting accentuates a culture of immediate gratification, creating a relationship between fans and the game based on a quickly satisfying result to a bet, thus reinforcing the problems the league faces in maintaining interest in an era of increasingly short attention spans.
Prop bets are also disliked by players. As an anonymous player survey revealed, “Nearly half (46%) of the 150 players in the poll said it was ‘bad.’ Another 20% either picked ‘undecided’ or ‘somewhere in the middle.’ From the perspective of players, a very understandable response. There’s pressure on them to succeed in reaching these ‘props’ or certain statistical totals” (Chiappone 5). This reveals a further negative impact of sports gambling and prop bets in particular. Hurting the players’ experience with the game will likely cause a worse product going forward and that would eventually reduce viewership.
Prop bets pose yet another problem for the league. This style of betting makes it much easier for players to participate in gambling unnoticed. As A. Martínez explains, “when you bet the under…if a player wants to exploit that they can control missing a shot on purpose, if they want to score hardly any points or no points at all” (1:08). Game interference is less detectable because players can brush off fixed performances as merely an off game. Given how easily disguisable player participation in prop bets on particular performance variables can be, fans may begin to question the authenticity of every on the court play. Dave Sheinin from the Washington Post believes we may already be too late to reverse this trend, noting “[a]lready, recent polling. . . suggests the accumulation of scandals has led many sports fans to question the legitimacy of what they are watching. Once the possibility of spot-fixing nestles in your mind, it can be hard to shake” (6). Fans may assume an off-night during the 82 game NBA season is the result of the worst case scenario of their favorite player cheating. Or fans could channel their suspicions against rival teams, believing those players are engaging in spot-fixing. Either way, fans lose trust in the league by believing someone within the game is acting dishonestly. In the long run, this is likely to cause a loss of viewership because fans will only support a product they believe in.
Some argue that sports gambling provides a possible solution to another problem identified by sports writer John Celestand, the lack of sustained interest throughout the NBA’s lengthy regular season. Viewership always increases in the playoffs, but the league needs sustained, higher level engagement throughout the regular season in order to maximize profits. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has made attempts to remedy the lack of regular season interest, but none have been as successful at increasing viewership as sports gambling. One example, creation of an in-season tournament, failed to substantially increase regular season viewership because the event is short-lived, fans feel the tournament is inauthentic and meaningless within the broader context of the NBA season, and the relatively small $500,000 prize did not motivate star players with substantial annual contracts. Similarly, the league’s efforts to crack down on load management, where players choose to play fewer games to avoid injury risk, has also found minimal success in increasing interest in the regular season. While Silver enacted a sixty-five game minimum for players to be eligible to earn coveted end of season awards such as the Most Valuable Player (“MVP”) award, this failed to achieve the goal of increasing star’s playing time in regular season games. Fans are also likely to be frustrated if a star player is denied MVP because of the new game minimums. For example, the league’s last two MVPs, Nikola Jokic and Shai Gildeous-Alexander, both missed games and playing time due to injury this season and under the new system may be ineligible to win an end-of-season award. In short, Silver’s efforts to increase regular season viewership have largely been ineffectual, making the NBA’s reliance on sports gambling to attract viewers for regular season games all the more significant.
A significant problem with this approach to generating regular season interest is the league’s internally inconsistent stance on sports gambling. The league has attempted a disciplinary crackdown on sports gambling among debaters, thus targeting the very industry which is currently propping up the NBA’s viewership numbers. In the past two years, Jontay Porter and Terry Rozier, two (now former) NBA players, and former Cleveland Cavaliers assistant coach Damon Jones, were each separately arrested for utilizing their insider position in the NBA to engage in gambling activities. The rise in improper player involvement in prop bets was also likely aided by the influence of widespread legalized sports gambling. Although sports gambling occurred before it was legalized, it was far less publicized and there were clear limits in the minds of the players of what was acceptable participation in gambling activities. As Jonathan Cohen, an expert on the history of sports gambling, puts it, “my bet – ha-ha – is that many of these players would not have even thought about gambling if they weren’t getting a DraftKings ad shoved down their throat every five minutes. So sort of the leagues are claiming that this is proof the system works, but I think the system has maybe worked a little too well in terms of the rising prevalence of gambling leading to more cases like this than we would have seen otherwise” (3:03). In other words, the NBA is sowing the seeds for more gambling scandals by only disciplining players who are caught gambling while leaving in place incentives for other players to match fix. Although the league has attempted to enforce anti-gambling policies for players, coaches, and referees who have been found to be involved in rigging games, these efforts have not been entirely successful in discouraging league members from betting on game results. The inconsistency in the league’s position on sports gambling is undermining its efforts to stop improper player involvement in gambling.
Perhaps the most significant problem with the league’s dependence on the gambling industry for revenue and viewership is how detrimental it is to the legitimacy of the NBA. Professional sports leagues like the NBA are built upon a social contract between the fan and the league. The underlying concept is that the league will provide an authentic and competitive athletic event and, in exchange, the fans will support the league with their time, money, and energy. The core requirements to this social contract are that the product, in the form of the showcased games, must be entertaining, and the game itself must be fair. Fairness, the second of these core requirements, is where the question of legitimacy comes into play. Sports gambling undermines the authenticity of professional basketball as a truly competitive sport because match fixing scandals fuel fan speculation about the results of every game. When a game is perceived to be manipulated people tend to take it less seriously. This is a common criticism of organizations like World Wrestling Entertainment and it is what separates sports from entertainment. Fans should value the exciting plays that make up the game as authentic expressions of athletic achievement but prop bets are undermining the trustworthiness of those plays.
The league’s dependence on sports gambling also risks the loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the group which probably matters the most to the future of the NBA: the youth. The NBA’s growth strategy has long been focused on capturing the attention of younger people. A “new Fan Score report from Playfly Sports and Vision Insights . . . confirms [the NBA] has the youngest and most diverse fanbase of the four major U.S. sports. The soon-to-be-released details reveal that 56% of the league’s fans were under 44-years-old during the 2022-23 season” (Friend 1). A significant number of youth in this country have an interest in basketball, which is exactly what the league needs to ensure future viewers. Shirley Leung, a writer for the Boston Globe, describes how “[m]y kids and their friends live and breathe sports. They look up to the stars. They catch every highlight. They know who scored and who stumbled. There’s a purity in debating who’s won, who’s lost, and why” (1). The league’s focus should be on growing and sustaining youth interest. If the NBA can do that, it will secure viewers for life.
As the experience of Leung’s children and their friends shows, debate and discussion about individual player achievements and dramatic plays within a game is at the core of many kids’ love for and interest in sports. At first glance, such debate is seemingly bolstered by sports gambling because it provides an added motivation to discuss statistics. These days, however, any broadcast’s analysis of player statistics comes in the context of a gambling-related discussion. This does not teach kids to love the sport of basketball for its amazing displays of physical achievement; instead, it teaches them to love gambling. Sports gambling also risks fueling the start of a potential addiction. In New York and New Jersey, “[s]ome 90% of high school students surveyed by the New York Council on Problem Gambling said they’d gambled at least once in the past year” (Schlott 1). Instead of harnessing youthful interest and curiosity in basketball to create lifelong devoted fans of the sport, gambling traps youth within a prison of dopamine hits from making a parlay (a bet with multiple parts). As Leung explains, quoting Jonathan Cohen, author of Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling, what you’re doing now is teaching them to love gambling,…What happens when all these 25-year-olds lose all their money or have a bad experience gambling and decide to hate gambling, and then they never were taught to love sports underneath that on its own terms?” (3). Similarly, the integration of sports gambling with mass media advertising and league event promotions, often targeted toward the goal of securing youth interest, promotes unsustainable engagement because, in the long term, the young “fans” created by gambling are likely to lose interest in the league if they associate it with the consequences of a devastating addiction or even just a big bet that was lost.
Although sports gambling has provided the NBA with a temporary boost in sponsorship revenue and ratings during a challenging time for the league, relying on gambling as a long term solution to declining viewership is unsustainable. It is only a matter of time until young people move on from gambling as the basis for their interest in the league, potentially eroding the viewer base critical to the NBA’s growth plan. Gambling also ties enjoyment of the sport to watching games for shorter amounts of time to gain the dopamine release from betting, likely decreasing the NBA’s net viewership by reinforcing this generation’s shortened attention spans. Reliance on sports gambling as the engine for the league’s growth risks recreating the same underlying problems that cause a lack of interest in the NBA’s long regular season. The most important challenge posed by sports gambling, however, is how detrimental it is to the legitimacy of the NBA. Even isolated scandals can cause fans to lose their trust in the fairness of games. The league’s inconsistent approach to gambling harms players by encouraging prop bets despite how they incentivize cheating and then punishing players for manipulating their performances to support such bets. The NBA must seek alternative revenue sources that will provide a more sustainable and balanced approach to viewership growth for the future while protecting the legitimacy of professional basketball.
Works Cited
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