Raptors reserve Jontay Porter might have thought he was smarter than the system. The NBA says he wasn’t

It seemed almost startlingly dumb. The 24-year-old Porter was a fringe prospect who was finding a home with the Toronto Raptors;  he had a chance to build what could have become a 10-year career, in a league where his older brother Michael Porter Jr. has a $179-million contract. It was a nice little story.

Now the league says its investigation remains open, but that it already has enough information to issue a ban, while sharing its information with federal prosecutors. Porter’s NBA career appears to be not just over but dead. Whether he committed a crime remains to be seen.

Unlike other North American sports leagues, the NBA revealed a raft of specific allegations. It was a contrast with the NHL, which was not exactly forthcoming with Shane Pinto’s 41-game gambling-related suspension in Ottawa, and the NFL, which tends to only offer broad outlines in its various gambling penalties.

But then, this was far more serious. According to the NBA, before a March 20 Raptors game against Sacramento, Jontay Porter disclosed his own health information to a known bettor, and a gambling associate bet an $80,000 parlay to win $1.1 million on Porter’s underperformance. Porter played three minutes, claiming he felt ill, and the sportsbook flagged the bet and stopped payment.

The NBA said Porter placed 13 bets on games through an associate’s account from January to March, totalling $54,094 in wagers, which led to a profit of $21,965. Three bets were multi-game parlays that included a Raptors game, in which Porter bet the Raptors would lose but didn’t play. He didn’t win any of those parlays.

That would mean Porter made a three-month profit of $21,965 in a league where the minimum salary for a first-year player on a full-season deal is about $278,500 over that span. It would mean he bet against his own franchise, and that he intentionally underperformed even though he didn’t have a fully guaranteed contract.

This is the kind of recklessness and stupidity that causes young people to wrap their cars around telephone poles. Porter is a big man with decent defensive instincts and some passing ability who could have parlayed — sorry — that skill set into a real NBA career. Team officials noted how smart he was as a player, how he read the floor. The Raptors thought they had found a piece.

Instead, Porter became the perfect sacrificial lamb: a young player on a two-way contract on a bad team who made it comically easy to detect a problem. You could argue the Raptors should have been leery of a player with a second Twitter account that talked crypto and investing, and that had a private Discord where customers could pay for stock tips. That’s a short hop to gambling.

Except Porter was something else, too: He was a target market of the new legal gambling boom. He was a young man who the league says bet as little as $15 and as much as $22,000 on wagers that included parlays and prop bets, both of which are hard bets to consistently win: sucker bets, more or less.

He didn’t understand that legal sports books sometimes limit how much people can win, and also monitor suspicious betting patterns. This is a picture of an unsophisticated young man who thought he was smarter than the system.

That’s the lifeblood of the current sports gambling environment. As Joey Politano, who writes the data-heavy economics newsletter Apricitas, put it: “Between sports gambling, crypto, and meme stocks, America’s fastest growing industry is just stealing from disaffected low trust 18-34 year old men.”

Legal sports betting revenue in the U.S. has risen from just under a billion dollars in 2019 to $10.92 billion in 2023, on almost $120 billion worth of bets. In Ontario, the first year of legal sports gambling generated $1.48 billion in bets. It’s propping up a lot of sports media at the moment, too.

This isn’t about morality; it’s about business. NBA commissioner Adam Silver did mention that the case raised questions about “the sufficiency of the regulatory framework currently in place, including the types of bets offered on our games and players.” In other words, profitable prop bets may be a problem, but gambling is here to stay.

In the end, Jontay Porter tried to game the system and lost his future in the process. This follows Shohei Ohtani’s ex-interpreter Ippei Mizuhara, who seems likely to lose everything to his gambling addiction, too. The real tragedy is that neither will be alone.