The NBA sent a memo to its authorized sportsbook partners on Friday telling them to kill a specific list of bet types. The headline item is the one that made somebody more than a million dollars on a player who left a game after three minutes.
Same-player under parlays are gone. So are bets on who wins the opening tip, bets on players missing specific shots, under bets on players expected to play fewer than 12 minutes, and alternate-line unders with outsized payouts.
Why that list and not another one
Because that list is a map of what already went wrong.
Jontay Porter admitted he deliberately left games early to benefit bettors while on a two-way contract with Toronto during the 2023-24 season. In one instance an $80,000 parlay on his unders paid roughly $1.1 million after he played three minutes. The league had already barred under bets on two-way players after that case. Friday’s memo extends the logic to any low-minute player.
Prosecutors have also alleged a similar pattern involving Terry Rozier in a March 2023 Hornets game in which he left after about nine minutes. Rozier has pleaded not guilty and denies wrongdoing, and no finding has been made against him.
Scott Kaufman-Ross, an NBA executive vice president, described the targeted structures as low likelihood, high payout bets, and said that looking at where the league had problems in the past was one of the inputs into the list.
Which is the right way to build this. You do not need a philosophy of gambling ethics to notice that every scandal involved a marginal player, a small number of minutes, and a bet that only pays if he does almost nothing.
The enforcement reach is real
This applies to NBA-authorized operators including DraftKings and FanDuel. The league says its authorized partners account for up to 99 percent of the U.S. legal betting market, which makes this closer to a rule than a request.
Kaufman-Ross also acknowledged the limit on how far the league can push. There is a balance, he said, between removing problematic bet types and driving action toward illegal markets. The NBA considered extending the restrictions to prediction markets and has no formal partnerships with them, which it admits makes enforcement difficult.
That is the honest hole in this. The league can tell DraftKings what to do. It cannot tell a prediction market anything, and that is where the next version of this problem is going to live.
The rest of the package
The memo came with other measures. Charles Tillman, the former NFL player and retired FBI agent, will lead in-person betting-rules training. The league is upgrading its AI-based unusual-betting-activity detection system. The fan code of conduct now covers harassment and threats from bettors. The NBA partnered with a group called Social Project to help players remove harassing social posts, and launched a text-based hotline for reporting threats.
That last cluster matters more than it sounds. The player-harassment side of legalized betting has gone almost entirely unaddressed by every league that took the sponsorship money, and the NBA is at least building a mechanism.
The timing is four days before opening night on Oct. 20. A league that spent several years selling betting partnerships is now spending the week before the season narrowing what those partners are allowed to sell. Both of those things are the NBA’s own doing, and the second one is overdue.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.