Not Everything Bad You See Is Because of LEGAL Sports Betting
An incident involving betting, an NBA player and a fan at a game in Florida is not necessarily the poster child for what ails the gambling industry.
Every bad story you see about sports betting these days is not automatically a problem related to the legal market.
Exhibit A: A recent story about an investigation into an altercation between NBA player Bradley Beal and a fan who accosted him at a game because he lost a bet. I always try to cite original sources, and it looks like TMZ broke it (apologies if I am giving them too much credit); more from ESPN here.
SPORTS BETTING = BAD?
Once the news disseminates, you are going to see some takes out in the wild that say “THIS IS WHAT’S WRONG WITH LEGAL SPORTS BETTING!!!!!”
But it’s important to note that this was at a game between the Washington Wizards and Orlando Magic, played in Florida. There’s no legal sports betting in Florida.
That doesn’t mean that this bet didn’t originate in a legal market, but it seems unlikely. Occam’s razor leads us to the idea that this bet was probably placed at one of a variety of offshore sportsbooks operating in Florida for decades. Those sportsbooks have advertised on Florida radio and other media for years. (One of my favorite old stories is about an offshore sportsbook with a Florida address.)
At a minimum, if you’re going to blame legal sports betting for this incident, you better have more information than we have now.
There’s more than meets the eye to bad betting stories
All of this is not to say that legal sports betting is blameless; the industry and operators have done lots of not-great stuff. But in the current environment, people keep looking for bad things and trying to attribute them to legal betting.
Another example I saw recently that saw a knee-jerk reaction: A man charged with stealing from his employer and using some of that to bet on sports. Yes, this story emanates from New Jersey, where legal sports betting has been around for years, but there’s still zero information (at least that I have seen), making it clear this happened at a legal sportsbook. But I saw several people decrying this as the fault of legal sports betting.
Yes, the simpler answer is it probably did come in the legal market, but it’s also not impossible this guy was betting with a bookie or offshore, especially if he was already allegedly criming (and yes, I know that’s not a real word, but maybe it will be.)
But here’s the other thing: Stories like this are not new! You can do a search and find dozens of examples of the model of “person stole x from y and gambled on z” in the US and beyond. The advent of legal sports betting isn’t the cause…it’s that people who like to steal also like to gamble the money they stole in an ill-advised attempt to make even more money:
New York Mets Fire Employee Who Bet On Baseball And Stole From Players
Pickering minor hockey loses $725,000 to treasurer ‘with gambling bug’
Bank teller who stole nearly $600,000 gets three years in prison
Anyway, if you’re going to blame legal sports betting for something, I beg you to make sure it’s the culprit first.
Image by Sheila Sund from PXhere.