Silver says stronger oversight still required for sports betting in NBA
silver-calls-for-stronger-sports-betting-regulation
NBA commissioner Adam Silver said Tuesday that the league needs tighter controls on sports wagering to minimize the risk of game manipulation and to discourage abusive fan behavior tied to lost bets.
Speaking on “The Pat McAfee Show” on Oct. 21, 2025, Silver highlighted the NBA’s 2024 request that sportsbook partners remove certain prop bets involving players on two-way contracts. The move followed an investigation that found former Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter deliberately underperformed during the 2023-24 season as part of a gambling scheme. Porter has since been banned from the NBA.
“We’ve asked some of our partners to pull back some of the prop bets, especially when they’re on two-way players, guys who don’t have the same stake in the competition,” Silver said. “We’re trying to put in place—learning as we go and working with the betting companies—some additional control to prevent some of that manipulation.”
Silver added that prop wagers can spark fan hostility, even when a team wins. “It’s often the case that your team wins and a player scores 25 points, but the bettor had bet that the player was going to score 28 or 30,” he said. “We have to protect the competitors. We want to protect the environment in the arena of people getting out of hand.”
Last week, the league circulated a memo to all franchises emphasizing strict enforcement of the NBA Fan Code of Conduct, according to a source familiar with the document.
Silver, who in 2014 called for federal sports-betting regulation in a New York Times op-ed, reiterated that a national framework remains preferable to the current state-by-state approach. “I think, probably, there should be more regulation, frankly,” he told McAfee. “I wish there was federal legislation rather than state by state. I think you’ve got to monitor the amount of promotion, the amount of advertising around it.”
The commissioner said legalized wagering has brought new tools for oversight, including detailed data on who is betting and from where. “With this regulated structure of legalized betting, we can monitor it in ways that were unimaginable years ago,” Silver noted. “If you’re in an arena and place a bet, we know you’re in the arena in many cases. We know where in the arena you are when you place that bet.”
Since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports wagering in 2018, 39 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have launched legal markets.
Source: ESPN
