Posted on Tue, Jul. 24, 2007
NBA's attitude on gambling is ironic in light of events
By JAN HUBBARD
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
The e-mails arrived in succession Friday morning:
1. 7:59 a.m.: A summary from Sports Business Daily in the
New York Post report that NBA referee Tim Donaghy was being investigated by the FBI for fixing games.
2. 8:14 a.m.: A news release from the NBA on Team USA beginning training camp in Las Vegas.
After a spirited search over the weekend, I finally found one writer who connected the two: David Stern's fascination with Las Vegas, the Mecca of sports betting, and a sports betting scandal. All of the other commentary was along the lines of, "Gosh. This is bad."
You think?
Vegas and Stern have been romancing each other for quite a while, and it has always seemed odd. Commissioners, by definition, are anti-gambling, but Stern has embraced the culture.
His teams accept sponsorship money from a variety of gambling operations -- local casinos as well as Internet sites. The NBA once took money from the New Jersey lottery in exchange for use of its team logos, which, presumably, enticed NBA fans to gamble on the lottery.
Other leagues accept similar sponsorship money, but the NBA is the only major league that allows a team to play in the same building as a casino -- the WNBA's Connecticut Sun.
For the last four years, there has been a summer league in Las Vegas and the NBA took over running it this year. In February, Las Vegas became the first non-NBA city to host an All-Star Game. Team USA, consisting solely of NBA players and with a significant number of NBA staffers working for USA Basketball, trained last week in Las Vegas.
And when Caracas, Venezuela, backed out of hosting the Tournament of the Americas -- the Olympic qualifying tournament -- Stern steered it to Las Vegas, where it will be played next month.
The NBA makes a fine distinction between types of gambling, pointing out that any time the league is in Las Vegas, sports books do not offer betting on NBA games.
Perhaps Stern hopes that one day, he can put a team in the city, reap the lucrative benefits, and sports books will drop betting on all NBA games. But that's not going to happen. At best, the sports books might be persuaded to not accept bets on the local team, but Vegas is Vegas and nobody is going to muscle it.
Besides, the idea that the NBA can embrace gambling on some levels but disassociate itself from gambling on levels that Stern chooses is flawed. It would be like having the next NBA board of governor's meeting at one of the legal bordellos near Reno and saying, "The NBA is against prostitution, but you have to admit the facilities are great."
Stern will have a press conference today, and what he will not say is this: Tim Donaghy is the best thing that could happen to the NBA at this point in its history.
The controversy will force Stern to re-examine his inconsistent approach to gambling institutions. If he believes NBA players, coaches, league and team employees have gone to Las Vegas on official events and have never bet on something NBA related, he's being naïve.
And what about those young referees who work the summer league?
The second reason the NBA will benefit is that nothing will be cleaner than NBA refereeing this year. If it was a mutual fund, I would buy it.
No doubt the controversy will result in periodic hysteria about individual calls but, honestly, most sports conspiracy theories are idiotic.
First of all, bettors fix games to beat the point spread, not to determine who wins or loses.
Second, the league does not fix games, because if any high-ranking executive was caught doing so, that person would go to prison.
(That last point was a service to Mavericks fans, who still believe there was some sort of conspiracy in the Dallas-Miami series last year. It didn't happen. David Stern and Stu Jackson are not interested in going to jail.)
No doubt that Stern has a mess on his hands. Tim Donaghy has saddled the NBA with an awful situation and the accompanying negative publicity for years to come.
But there is irony in the deplorable situation. The Donaghy experience may ultimately teach the league a few valuable lessons about the consequences of any sort of relationship between sports and gambling.
Jan Hubbard, 817-390-7760
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Questions for David Stern
July 24, 2007 10:14 AM
In about an hour, you'll get to watch David Stern answer questions for the first time about Tim Donaghy, the referee who is alleged to have fixed games in cahoots with organized crime.
I have been mulling what questions I'd like to have answered, and was about to write about it, but then I found
ESPN's Marc Stein had pretty much nailed all of them. Stein's piece is loaded with new information, and frankly is the best thing I have read yet on the topic.
Stern's press conference will be live on ESPN television, ESPNEWS, and here on ESPN.com at 11 am ET. I'm thinking there's a good chance that this will be the most-watched press conference of David Stern's career. Sometimes he can be so charming and intelligent. Other times he comes off as callous and dictatorial. As someone who loves the NBA, I hope we get the friendlier one. It'd be good for the league if he can use this moment to not just establish that he's in control, but also to win over a lot of the public.
UPDATE: Conference starting now. You can launch video player from the main page of ESPN.com or
click here. (UPDATED LINK)
UPDATE: Things that stood out to me from this press conference:
- If I'm not mistaken, David Stern somehow made it through all of the press conference (at least the part that I saw before my feed froze) without once saying the words "mob" or "mafia." He didn't even make a passing reference, and the only question he really got about that angle he ignored completely. I can imagine why he had that approach -- it's a thicket of bad PR and legal complications -- but all the same, it seems odd not to at least address the notion that the mob might have been influencing games.
- Tim Donaghy has been hung out to dry. Stern has closed the door every way possible on that guy. He didn't really allow, in any way, for the possiblity of Donaghy's innocence -- a much harsher line than the media or the judicial system would allow at this point. Stern talked about punishments and prevention. He said things like he wanted to see if that Suns-Spurs game was one of the games that was gambled on, which implies with certainty that some were gambled on. He even, oddly, told the world Donaghy's income last year. (Per Stern, $260,000.) The most interesting question of the conference came late, when someone asked how Stern knew Donaghy was guilty, when he hadn't even been charged with anything. Stern said that Donaghy's lawyer had said that Donaghy was contemplating a plea. Contemplating a plea? That is the same as guilt? I assume the FBI has told Stern more than he is telling us.
- This press conference was, I thought, very successful in explaining whether or not the league let Donaghy referee games when he was under suspicion of gambling. There was one allegation that he had been in a casino, and the league, according to Stern, investigated the hell out of it and came up with nothing. Stern was poised and firm in his insistence that the FBI first called with word of the investigation on June 20, and he first met with them the following day.
- David Stern seemed to have Las Vegas's back a little. He volunteered at a moment when it seemed a bit forced that it was his understanding that the bets Donaghy is said to have placed were not through Las Vegas. He also said that he canceled a scheduled meeting about relocating a team to Las Vegas because it seemed unseemly at this time.
League-Wide Issues,
Tim Donaghy
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