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Dan Wetzel
At its best, the NBA can be the best — all-in, all-out competition and drama, especially in the playoffs.
The regular season, however, is different; too often you don’t know what you are going to get.
Load management, tanking for draft position and a run of gambling-related scandals that have ensnared players and even a head coach have left fans understandably suspicious.
Is this real or something else?
Against this backdrop, one of the league’s biggest stars, Milwaukee‘s Giannis Antetokounmpo, might not have done anything wrong, but he also didn’t do the NBA any favors last week when he announced he had taken a small ownership in the prediction market Kalshi.
Kalshi isn’t a sportsbook, like a DraftKings or a BetMGM. It is a platform that allows individuals to buy and trade a prediction contract on a binary question — will this happen, yes or no?
What began as a way to «wager» on who would win an election or an Oscar has come for all segments of society, sports in particular.
You can, for example, «predict» whether an NBA team will win or lose a game, whether they will win or lose by a certain number of points, whether an individual player will register more than a specific number of points or blocks and even whether they will play at all.
It also extends to off-court results — awards, trades and so on. Outside of sports, it is a free-for-all, with everything from «will Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner be engaged this year» (46.5% say yes) to whether or not the number of measles cases will surpass 10,000 (38% say yes).
Because of the nature of some of the predictions, the results are open to easy manipulation that would be especially hard to detect.
These predictive markets are the last thing professional sports leagues need seeping into the public consciousness. Even worse when star athletes become involved as owners (a nonwagered prediction: Antetokounmpo won’t be the last).
Consider that last week, a rumor apparently circulated, mostly within college fraternities and sororities, that actor Mark Wahlberg would attend the Super Bowl. That caused nearly $24 million to be bet on that occurring. Only, it turns out Wahlberg apparently didn’t go. Kalshi still hadn’t settled the bet as of early Wednesday.
No malfeasance has been alleged, but eyebrows and mistrust have justifiably arisen.
Obviously something such as whether to attend or not attend an event — or generating the rumor that someone might attend or not attend an event — is easier for someone to influence than winning a game or covering a specific performance spread. Yet big money is being laid on it anyway.
Under the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement, Antetokounmpo is allowed to endorse and make small equity investments in sports betting companies, which is how the league treats prediction markets. Players are prohibited from promoting NBA-specific wagers.
Considering the growth of Kalshi — estimates have market volume growing from about $2 billion in 2024 to $24 billion in 2025 — it is likely a wise move. Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour told CNBC on Tuesday that trading volume exceeded $1 billion on Sunday’s Super Bowl alone.
«I love the Kalshi markets and have been checking them often recently,» Antetokounmpo said in a statement.
Kalshi is unlike a sportsbook in that it profits off the trades, not the results. The company often equates what it does to the stock market. It recently announced increased surveillance and enforcement to identify suspicious activity on the platform.
Great, but is it enough?
When, in 2018, the United States Supreme Court declared the federal ban on sports wagering unconstitutional, governments, regulatory bodies and sports leagues worked to set up extensive integrity systems.
Despite that, prop bets on individual performances — including first-half rebounding totals, for example — have proven to be a soft spot. Players can simply fake an injury to assure the under. The predictions market is next-level, inviting even greater skepticism.
One of the popular categories last week was, for example, whether Antetokounmpo would be traded (he wasn’t), which is something Antetokounmpo himself would have significant say over.
This all comes on top of fan dissatisfaction with teams resting players for regular-season games to assure maximum performance in the playoffs. The practice can make certain contests noncompetitive.
Then there is the age-old issue of tanking. With a potentially epic draft class currently in college basketball, there is little incentive for teams with losing records to do anything but try to improve their chances at acquiring a better pick.
On Saturday, Utah led Orlando, 94-87 entering the fourth quarter. The Jazz were led by Lauri Markkanen (27 points), Jaren Jackson Jr. (22 points) and Jusuf Nurkic (16 rebounds). None of them, however, played in the fourth quarter as the Magic came back to win 120-117. Utah fell to 16-37 on the season.
OK, then.
All this might be legal. All of it might be on the up-and-up. Contests, of course, have been fixed long before legalized wagering.
The more intertwined the leagues, teams and players get with sports betting, however, the more fans are being asked to extend their blind faith.
At some point, perception defines reality, and optics are going to overwhelm everything.
