Miami Heat point guard Terry Rozier is under investigation in connection with a sports betting scandal, the NBA said Thursday, months after former Toronto Raptors center Jontay Porter was banned for life in a gambling scandal.
The league was alerted to suspicious betting surrounding Rozier in March 2023. Rozier, then a member of the Charlotte Hornets, was playing the New Orleans Pelicans, NBA spokesman Mike Bass confirmed in a statement.
“The league conducted an investigation and did not find a violation of NBA rules,” Bass said. “We are now aware of an investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York related to this matter and have been cooperating with that investigation.”
The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment. The NBA Players Association and Rozier’s agent did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the probe.
Alarms were raised after an unusually high number of wagers were placed on Rozier to go under statistical benchmarks, multiple sources told the Journal. The firm tasked with monitoring gambling activity, U.S. Integrity, alerted the NBA and sportsbooks.
Rozier, whose career earnings exceed $100 million, left with a sore right foot after having scored only five points, according to the NBA game highlights.
The Journal reported that the investigation is part of the same federal probe into sports betting that was opened into Porter.
Porter pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to commit wire fraud for purposefully leaving two games to help people to win big bets that he would do badly. He admitted in court that he agreed to the scheme to help settle his gambling debts.
“I know what I did was wrong, unlawful, and I am deeply sorry,” he said last year.
Porter, who has not yet been sentenced, faces roughly three to four years in prison, in addition to fines and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in restitution.
The NBA banned Porter for life in April.
“There is nothing more important than protecting the integrity of NBA competition for our fans, our teams and everyone associated with our sport, which is why Jontay Porter’s blatant violations of our gaming rules are being met with the most severe punishment,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said at the time.
The NBA Players Association pledged that it would provide him with the resources he needed but also supported the league’s policy on gambling. The union said at the time that the guidelines are “paramount to maintaining the integrity of our athletes and protecting the future of the sports.”
Sports gambling has been on the rise since the Supreme Court overturned a ban on sports betting in 2018, with a particular surge in the early days of the 2020 Covid pandemic. Last year, NBC News reported a rise in calls to gambling addiction hotlines in at least three states.
Some have also raised concerns that legalization of sports betting will lead to more issues of match fixing. In a 2023 series for Bloomberg, columnist Thomas O’Brien said the surge in gambling apps would only deepen the age-old problem.
While match fixing has always been around, it is now more frequent and widespread, analysts say, because the advent of online gambling and mobile devices allows “almost anyone, anywhere, to bet,” O’Brien wrote.
