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Dan Wetzel
multiple authors
At its best, the NBA can be the best — all-in, all-out competition and drama, especially in the playoffs.
However, the regular season is different; Often you don’t know what you’re going to get.
Load management, tanking and run off for draft position gambling scams This has trapped players and even a head coach and created doubts in the minds of fans.
Is this true or something else?
Against this backdrop, one of the league’s biggest stars, milwaukee‘S giannis antetokounmpoHe may have done nothing wrong, but he didn’t do the NBA any favors last week when he announced he took a small ownership stake in prediction market Kalashi.
Kalshi is not a sportsbook like DraftKings or BetMGM. It is a platform that allows individuals to buy and trade prediction contracts on a binary question – will it happen, yes or no?
What started as a way to “bet” on who will win an election or an Oscar has come to permeate all segments of society, especially sports.
For example, you can “predict” whether an NBA team will win or lose a game, whether it will win or lose by a certain number of points, whether an individual player will record more than a specific number of points or blocks, and even whether someone will play or not.
This also extends to out-of-court outcomes – awards, business etc. Besides sports, it’s a free-for-all, covering everything from “Will Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner get engaged this year” (46.5% say yes) to whether the number of measles cases will exceed 10,000 (38% say yes).
Due to the nature of some predictions, the results are open to easy manipulation that would be particularly difficult to detect.
These predictable markets are the last thing professional sports leagues need to penetrate the public consciousness. Even worse when star athletes join in as owners (a non-staking prediction: Antetokounmpo won’t be the last one).
Consider that a rumor apparently spread last week, mostly within college fraternities and classmates, that actor Mark Wahlberg would be attending the Super Bowl. This led to approximately $24 million being wagered on that event. Only, it turns out that Wahlberg apparently didn’t go. Kalshi had not settled the bet till Wednesday morning.
No wrongdoing has been alleged, but eyebrows and disbelief have been justifiably raised.
Obviously attending or not going to an event – or spreading a rumor that someone may or may not go to an event – is easier to influence someone than winning a game or covering a specific performance spread. Still a huge amount is being spent on it.
Under the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement, Antetokounmpo is allowed to endorse and make small equity investments in sports betting companies, similar to how the league treats prediction markets. Players are prohibited from promoting NBA-specific bets.
Considering Kalshi’s growth – the market volume is estimated to grow from approximately $2 billion in 2024 to $24 billion in 2025 – this is probably a wise move. Trading volume for Sunday’s Super Bowl alone exceeded $1 billion, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour told CNBC on Tuesday.
“I love Kalshi Markets and have been checking them out often recently,” Antetokounmpo said in a statement.
Kalshi is the opposite of a sportsbook, in that profits are made from trades, not outcomes. The company often equates what it does to the stock market. It recently announced increased monitoring and enforcement to identify suspicious activity on the platform.
Great, but is that enough?
When, in 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the federal ban on sports betting unconstitutional, governments, regulatory bodies, and sports leagues worked to establish comprehensive integrity systems.
Despite this, prop bets on individual performance – including first-half rebounding totals, for example – have proven to be a soft spot. Players may fake an injury to reassure the under. Prediction markets are next level, inviting even more skepticism.
For example, one of the popular categories last week was whether Antetokounmpo would be traded (he wasn’t), which would have a significant impact on Antetokounmpo himself.
All of this comes on top of fans’ dissatisfaction with teams resting players for regular season games to ensure maximum performance in the playoffs. This practice may make some competitions uncompetitive.
Then there is the age-old issue of tanking. With a potentially epic draft class in college basketball currently, there is little incentive for teams with losing records to do anything but try to improve their chances of getting a better selection.
on saturday, utah led orlando 94-87 entering the fourth quarter. jazz led lauri markkanen (27 points), jaren jackson jr. (22 marks) and Jusuf Nurkic (16 rebounds). However, none of those three played in the fourth quarter as the Magic came back to win 120-117. Utah fell to 16–37 on the season.
Well then.
All this could be legal. This may all be superficial. Of course, contests are decided long before legal wagering takes place.
The more leagues, teams and players become involved with sports betting, the more fans are being asked to exert blind faith.
At some point, perception defines reality and optics take over everything else.
