The NBA just banned the specific bet that ended Jontay Porter's career, and it only took a lifetime ban, a federal wire-fraud plea and a second player in handcuffs to get there. Credit where it's due: this is a real fix for the league's integrity problem. It fixes nothing else, and the sportsbooks walk away from it without a scratch.
On October 16, the league told its sportsbook partners to stop offering a cluster of bets: parlays built on the under of the same player's statistics, "first of" markets like who wins the opening tip or grabs the first rebound, and under bets on players expected to play fewer than 12 minutes a game. Books are also barred from offering juiced-up alternate lines on unders, and bettors can no longer set their own custom "alternate under" number. This builds on last season's restrictions on 10-day and two-way contract players and on props for turnovers, fouls and missed free throws.
Look at that list next to the Porter case and the targeting is obvious. In two games, on January 26 and March 20, Porter played fewer than five minutes citing injury or illness. Around the March 20 game, he fed confidential information about his own health to a known bettor, and an associate placed an $80,000 parlay prop bet to win $1.1 million, wagering Porter would underperform. The league's own words for that kind of combination are "low likelihood, high payout bets." Then there's Terry Rozier, charged last October alongside Damon Jones, accused of tipping associates that he planned to leave a game early, with prosecutors pointing to a March 2023 game he exited after nine minutes. Chauncey Billups was swept into the same federal probe.
So yes, close the loophole. An under parlay on a benchwarmer who then mysteriously sits with an "illness" is a bribe with a payout menu attached. Killing it makes it harder for the next Porter to monetize his own absence. That's a genuine good.
What this protects is narrower than it looks. The league is using the contractual leverage it wrote into its deals with DraftKings, FanDuel and the rest, and by its own estimate those authorized books cover roughly 99% of the U.S. market. The NBA sells access to its games. When a bet type threatens the credibility of that product, it removes the bet type. That's a fine motive for integrity, and it has nothing to do with the guy who just blew his paycheck chasing a same-game parlay on a Tuesday.
The sportsbooks didn't lose anything here. They agreed to this, and a company only gives up a product that fast when the product was a rounding error on the balance sheet. The under-parlay-on-a-scrub market was never where the money lives. The money lives in the endless scroll of legal, encouraged, still-available props the league and its partners both profit from. Strip out the few bets that could produce another federal indictment and keep the firehose running everywhere else. Call it reform.
The real harm, the bankruptcies and the wrecked people that come with putting a casino in every pocket, is untouched. The league even admits the tightrope it's walking: it says there's "a balance between ensuring that we are removing problematic bet types but also ensuring that we don't just move activity into the illegal market." Translate that and you get the quiet part: keep the bettors here, on the authorized books, where everybody gets paid.
Porter is still waiting to be sentenced, facing up to four years. The parlay that brought him down is gone. The machine that made that parlay profitable for everyone except him is humming along, slightly cleaner, exactly as lucrative.
