NBA’s Banning Jontay Porter for Gambling Is an Easy Call. Here’s Why.

• Jontay Porter of the Toronto Raptors has been banned for life from the NBA due to a betting scandal.
• If you think this is a crisis for the NBA, think again: the NBA is happy to make an example of Porter.
• The NBA – and many other institutions – really want sports betting to thrive. The move is meant to give punters the confidence to continue betting.

How stupid do you have to be to ruin your NBA career in a betting scandal?

Or, if you don’t like that framework, try this: How much trouble do you have to have — financial or otherwise — to ruin an NBA career in a betting scandal?

I have no idea. I can’t figure out what led Jontay Porter of the Toronto Raptors to 1) conspire with bettors about a game he was playing and 2) bet on NBA games, including against his own team .

But it’s easy to see why Porter’s case resulted in a lifetime ban from the NBA, where he reportedly earned at least $2.3 million over three years.

In fact, it can be argued that Porter’s case is good for the NBA: it allows the league to draw a line as clear as day for any other player stupid or desperate enough to do this sort of thing. And, most importantly, it allows everyone to believe that Porter’s case is an anomaly and that they should immediately start betting on NBA games again.

And the NBA, like every other professional sports league, really wants people to bet on games. He believes that sports betting – mostly illegal in the United States until 2018 and now a booming business – is important to its future growth.

You can debate the accuracy of this theory: yes, people are betting tons of money on sports these days ($120 billion in the US last year alone). But is it a small but deep niche of bettors or a wide range of people who occasionally spend a few dollars on a game? And you can also debate the morality of the theory: even if gaming is something people enjoy doing, should we encourage it?

But the NBA and the rest of major sports — along with a sports media ecosystem that expects sports betting to generate huge gains for television networks, publishers, podcasts and many other media outlets — are betting now fully. It seems unlikely that it will ever come back.

You may see some adjustments in the future to make future carriers even less likely – even as sports betting scandals continue to crop up in all kinds of sports. NBA boss Adam Silver, in a statement regarding Porter’s ban, referred to “significant questions regarding the sufficiency of the regulatory framework currently in place, including the types of betting offered on our games and players “.

Silver is probably talking about “prop bets”, which go beyond the simple question of who will win/how many bets even non-best bets may have heard of, and to much more targeted bets, like the number of points an individual player could score — or even how long the national anthem could last during a Super Bowl.

Sportsbooks often offer props because they can attract bettors with big winnings. (The entire plot of “Uncut Gems” hinges on the absurd, low-odds, high-return side bets that Adam Sandler’s character makes.) But you can see the obvious downside, especially with side bets focused on individual players – this gives players the ability to directly influence outcomes.

And it allegedly happened with Porter: The NBA claims a bettor placed an $80,000 bet that could have won $1.1 million betting that Porter would have a bad game — and then Porter withdrew from that match after a few minutes, saying he was sick. .

But those are just details: What the NBA can’t — or at least thinks it can’t — allow is to give lawmakers a chance to rethink their stance on sports betting and return it to illegal again. There is simply too much money at stake.

Which made Porter’s fate easy.