The commissioner has spoken.
In an op-ed piece in The New York Times, Adam Silver writes that the United States should legalize and regulate sports betting.
The comments come on the heels of the NBA's announcement Wednesday that it signed a four-year exclusive deal with fantasy sports website FanDuel.
As Silver writes, in 1992 the major professional sports leagues supported the passage by Congress of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, or PASPA, which generally prohibited states from authorizing sports betting.
Silver's argument:
But despite legal restrictions, sports betting is widespread. It is a thriving underground business that operates free from regulation or oversight. Because there are few legal options available, those who wish to bet resort to illicit bookmaking operations and shady offshore websites. There is no solid data on the volume of illegal sports betting activity in the United States, but some estimate that nearly $400 billion is illegally wagered on sports each year.
Times have changed since PASPA was enacted. Gambling has increasingly become a popular and accepted form of entertainment in the United States. Most states offer lotteries. Over half of them have legal casinos. Three have approved some form of Internet gambling, with others poised to follow.
There is an obvious appetite among sports fans for a safe and legal way to wager on professional sporting events. Mainstream media outlets regularly publish sports betting lines and point spreads. Voters in New Jersey overwhelmingly voiced their support for legal sports betting in a 2011 referendum. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey recently signed a bill authorizing sports betting at local casinos and horse racetracks, a law the NBA and other leagues have opposed - and a federal court has blocked - because it violates PASPA.
Silver goes on to argue that sports betting and other forms of gambling are popular, legal and regulated in other parts of the world, such as England.
Congress should act, Silver said, and create a federal framework that would allow individual states to authorize betting on professional sports, with regulatory requirements and technological safeguards.
These requirements would include: mandatory monitoring and reporting of unusual betting-line movements; a licensing protocol to ensure betting operators are legitimate; minimum-age verification measures; geo-blocking technology to ensure betting is available only where it is legal; mechanisms to identify and exclude people with gambling problems; and education about responsible gaming.
The commissioner said that maintaining the integrity of the game is of the utmost importance to him, and any new action would have to ensure that.
A compelling case by the NBA's most powerful man.
