The NHL And Other Leagues Need More Transparency On Betting Violations, Not Less
If you’re even tangentially involved with sports betting in North America, you already know the news. An Ottawa Senators player, Shane Pinto, was suspended for 41 games for violating the NHL’s gambling policy.
We know precious little about why Pinto was suspended. The NHL’s statement said only that Pinto was suspended “for activities relating to sports wagering” and that he did not directly bet on NHL games.
Some early reporting started digging into it, but even that reporting is vague. Here’s SportsNet in Canada providing some more details:
According to multiple sources, one of the major issues leading to Pinto’s penalty was along the lines of “proxy betting,” where another individual or individuals have access to a legal account in his name.
That reporting generates as many questions as answers, in my mind. Speculating about what Pinto did is reckless, but it’s also exactly what’s going to happen with vague statements from the league about the activity in question.
And that’s where the problem lies. In today’s era of increased attention on sports betting, leagues and players associations should arguably want as much transparency around gambling as possible.
The NHL Players Association is trying to protect a player, I get that, and that’s its job. But at some point, a lack of transparency also doesn’t serve a player’s best interests. Instead of knowing exactly what the player did, we get people envisioning scenarios that could lead to suspending a player for half a season, which is obviously a pretty serious penalty. We don’t actually know if Pinto did anything most of us would qualify as nefarious. Still, I’ve already seen more than one person speculate on things on the more nefarious end of the spectrum.
I’d also be shocked if journalists covering the NHL or gambling don’t eventually root out exactly what happened here. Maybe that’s not the best reason for upfront transparency, but it is reality.
It pains me to give the NFL credit on sports betting issues, but they’ve actually done a good job on transparency on gambling suspensions. Whether you agree with the punishment is another issue, but they are at least communicating with a lot of clarity about the gambling activity that led to suspensions.
In the background is the fact that the NHL and its teams are now actively trying to profit from legal gambling. The Senators have had a pair of betting sponsors in the past two years, first Bet99, now Betway. (It’s also hard to believe this is the only person in the NHL’s orbit in the past five years who has violated the league’s gambling policy; more likely it’s the only one to have been caught.)
In any event, the best thing for the integrity of the NHL is to be more forthright about gambling suspensions, not less. Fostering speculation about what Pinto did is arguably more harmful than the truth.
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