The opening of the 2025–26 National Basketball Association season was unexpectedly overshadowed when the FBI announced the arrests of two NBA sports figures Oct. 23 at a New York City news conference. Those arrested were Portland Trailblazers coach and former star player Chauncey Billups, who was inducted into the James Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame as a player in August, and Miami Heat player Terry Rozier, in two separate incidents of illegal sports gambling.
Sports betting industry revenue has grown 2,650% in five years.
This investigation had been underway for more than two years. According to FBI director Kash Patel, it is expected to bring about an estimated 30 more arrests in the near future.
According to the indictment, Billups and Rozier had access to private information known by NBA players or NBA coaches that would likely affect the outcome of games or players’ performances and provided that information to other co-conspirators in exchange for either a flat fee or a share of betting profits.
Patel stated, “This is the insider trading saga for the NBA, that’s what this is.” (ESPN, Oct. 23)
Both Billups and Rozier are out on bail and have been put on indefinite leave from the NBA. Their court dates are set for late November and early December, respectively.
Not isolated occurrences
On the surface, one could easily misconstrue the arrests of Billups and Rozier as being two separate, random incidents. But that view would be missing the forest for the trees. U.S. sports, whether amateur or professional, is a multibillion dollar for-profit industry under capitalism. And gambling, the majority of it deemed illegal for many decades, excluding casinos, has been an integral part of getting a larger cut of the profits for individual players or teams for over a century.
For instance, there was the infamous “Black Sox Scandal” involving game-fixing in Major League Baseball where, in exchange for payment from a gambling syndicate, eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of intentionally losing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.
The late, great baseball player Pete Rose to this day has been denied induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. When he was an active player Rose was banned forever from playing baseball for betting on his own team, the Cincinnati Reds.
These two NBA arrests are just the tip of the iceberg. Some are asking why a coach such as Billups, who had just signed a contract extension, or a player like Rozier, making millions of dollars, would allegedly become involved in illegal ways to gamble. The question is not why, but why not, when there is the potential and temptation of making even more money.
The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 signed by President George H.W. Bush made the business of gambling illegal in all but a handful of states, most notably Nevada.
But since this law could only curtail and not stop illegal gambling, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the 1992 law on May 14, 2018, allowing states to legally bring in more profits from betting.
The 2018 ruling led the way to establishing online sports betting, where people wanting to bet no longer had to discreetly place wagers for sports events but have the luxury of using smart phones and computers to make those bets from anywhere in the world.
According to the American Gaming Association’s annual report issued this past February, the U.S. sports betting industry posted a record $13.71 billion revenue in 2024, up from the 2023 record of $11.04 billion.
The AGA said legal sportsbooks took in nearly $150 billion worth of bets, a 22.2% increase from 2023. (ESPN, Feb. 19, 2025) A legal sportsbook is a company that is licensed and regulated by a state or jurisdiction to accept wagers on sporting events.
Sports betting ties to capitalism
The FBI has accused Billups specifically of having alleged ties to organized crime families with poker betting schemes. But in reality, isn’t Wall Street the biggest legalized crime operation on a global scale? Patel accused the NBA of “inside trading,” but don’t Wall Street investors conduct inside trading daily behind closed doors with the buying and selling of trillions of dollars worth of stocks and bonds in the U.S. Stock Exchange? Doesn’t virtually every institution under capitalism base its existence on making a profit?
It doesn’t matter how rich an individual billionaire may be due to the inherent drive for banks and corporations to expand their global markets to make more profits. This drive for profits has a trickle down effect on various industries, including sports.
Figures like Billups, Rozier and Rose, whether guilty or not of charges waged against them, along with others, have become scapegoats within the real scandal, which is the addictive gambling industry itself.
The state intervention from the FBI exists not to mete out any real justice but to single out any perceived threat to the profits of the administrators of the capitalist system; that is the billionaire class.
And in the case of this white supremacist administration led by Donald Trump, racism is an underlying factor for the FBI targeting a predominately Black, immensely popular league like the NBA.