(ThyBlackMan.com) While watching sports on television, it is nearly impossible to avoid seeing celebrities such as Kevin Hart and Jamie Foxx promoting sports gambling ads multiple times over the course of a three-hour football game or two-hour basketball game. It speaks to the increased presence of companies like MGM Casino, Caesars Sportsbook, FanDuel, and similar gambling outlets that they are able to have big name celebrities promote their companies. The legalization of sports betting in most U.S. states has had a massive impact on the sports landscape and numbers of companies.
It has had a major impact on the major professional sports leagues as well including the National Basketball Association, which has seen the start of its 2025-2026 regular season overshadowed by the October 2025 FBI sports betting gambling probe involving current Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, and others. Rozier, Billups and former NBA player and assistant coach Damon Jones were all arrested in October 2025 as part of a wide-ranging gambling investigation involving more than 30 people.
While Terry Rozier has accomplished some notable things during his career, Chauncey Billups is a much bigger name and recent Basketball Hall of Fame inductee. As the former point guard of the “Goin’ To Work” Detroit Pistons teams of the 2000s, Billups won the NBA Finals Most Valuable Player award of the 2024 NBA Finals as the Pistons upset the Shaq-Kobe led Lakers dynasty of the 2000s. He was a leader of that team, was well respected as an NBA player during much of his playing career, and became the head coach of a young Portland Trail Blazers team trying to find its footing in recent years. Billups is allegedly accused of disclosing confidential injury information in a game he coached, and he has been linked to an “illegal poker operation tied to the Mafia,”. The poker scheme included alleged actions such as X-ray tables to scan playing cards, custom glasses with the ability to read cards, and other suspicious cheating activities in high stakes poker games.
Chauncey Billups’ attorney, Chris Heywood, had strong words as it relates towards the charges of his client, in a statement to ESPN. “To believe that Chauncey Billups did what the federal government is accusing him of is to believe that he would risk his hall-of-fame legacy, his reputation and his freedom. He would not jeopardize those things for anything, let alone a card game,” Heywood said. “Billups has never and would never gamble on basketball games, provide insider information, or sacrifice the trust of his team and the League.” In the court of public opinion, it will be a challenge for Billups to overcome as even stories of his past alleged gambling indiscretions are getting more attention.
While illegal gambling on sports has been a longstanding significant driver for professional and major college sports, the legalization of sports in recent years has made the sports landscape more unsteady in the current age. The NBA and all major professional sports leagues are under the radar and even major college sports has major question marks as well. It will take evaluating lessons learned from some of the biggest sports gambling scandals of the past from the Black Sox scandal of a century ago to the Pete Rose banishment to on a much smaller level the lifetime ban of former NBA player Jontay Porter to manage the significant challenges that sports gambling can cause.
Staff Writer; Mark Hines
