NBA Pulls Same-Player Under Parlays and Other Prop Markets From Partner Sportsbooks

Michael Johnson
By Senior writer, US gambling and regulation Published Sources linked below5 min read
A packed NBA game at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, seen from the upper bowl
Photo: Troutfarm27, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The NBA has told its sportsbook partners to stop offering several kinds of player bets this season, including the same-player “under” parlays that appear in federal cases against former player Jontay Porter and veteran guard Terry Rozier.

The restrictions were laid out in a league memo sent to authorized operators on Friday, October 16, which ESPN obtained and first reported. DraftKings, FanDuel and Caesars all issued supportive statements the same day.

Which bets are going away

Checklist of five NBA prop markets partner sportsbooks dropped, beside the Porter case: an $80,000 parlay on his unders with a $1.1M potential payout; he played 3 minutes.
The NBA's Oct. 16 memo removes five low-probability, high-payout prop markets from partner sportsbooks, but does not reach prediction market exchanges. Source: ESPN, Las Vegas Review-Journal.

According to the memo as reported by ESPN and the Las Vegas Review-Journal, partner sportsbooks may no longer offer:

  • Parlays that combine two or more “under” outcomes on the same player’s statistics in a game.
  • Bets on which team wins the opening tip.
  • Markets on a player missing a specific shot.
  • Under bets on players projected to play fewer than 12 minutes.
  • Alternate under lines that carry boosted payouts.

ESPN’s Shams Charania also described a wider ban on “first of” markets, such as which player records a given shot, rebound or assist first. The memo itself described the targeted wagers as low-probability, high-payout bets.

The NBA can impose these limits because its agreements with partner sportsbooks give it a say over what licensed operators list on its games. The league estimates that its partner sportsbooks handle more than 99% of the legal U.S. betting market. In Nevada, where DraftKings and FanDuel do not operate, the memo went to authorized operators including Caesars Sportsbook and BetMGM.

Why these markets

The bets now off the board share a common weakness. They can be decided by a single player’s choice to leave a game early or play poorly, and they pay out heavily when that happens.

That is exactly the pattern federal prosecutors say they found. In the Porter case, prosecutors said one bettor put $80,000 on a single parlay backing Porter to finish below his lines in six stat categories, from points and rebounds to steals and blocks, during a March 2024 Raptors game against Sacramento. The ticket would have paid about $1.1 million. Porter left after three minutes, and a sportsbook canceled the wager. Porter later admitted removing himself from games to benefit bettors and has been banned from the NBA for life.

Prosecutors allege a similar approach a year earlier involving Rozier, who left a March 2023 Hornets game against New Orleans after roughly nine minutes. Rozier has pleaded not guilty and denies wrongdoing.

Scott Kaufman-Ross, an NBA executive vice president, said in an ESPN interview that past cases were one factor in choosing which markets to cut, while warning that going too far carries its own risk. “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,” he said.

The league had already barred sportsbooks from taking unders on players on two-way contracts after the Porter scheme came to light.

The criminal cases keep moving

The memo landed two days after a key guilty plea. On Wednesday, October 14, Las Vegas bettor Shane Hennen, 41, known as “Sugar Shane,” pleaded guilty in federal court in Philadelphia to bribery in sporting contests, wire fraud and related conspiracy charges tied to fixing Chinese Basketball Association and NCAA Division I men’s games, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

He also pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy charges brought in the Eastern District of New York over betting on NBA games using non-public information from players and coaches. According to the Review-Journal, Hennen’s wagers on Rozier falling short of his prop lines topped $200,000.

Prosecutors say the college scheme alone involved more than 39 players on more than 17 Division I teams, more than 29 fixed or attempted-fixed games, over $3 million in fraudulent wagers and more than $1.1 million in losses to sportsbooks. Hennen is scheduled to be sentenced on February 25.

What it means for sportsbooks and bettors

For the major operators, the change is less dramatic than it may sound. A DraftKings spokesperson said some of the restrictions already matched its practices, and Caesars told the Review-Journal it had helped shape the memo and removed the affected markets. FanDuel said in a statement that the legal industry depends on cooperation with leagues and states.

For customers of licensed sportsbooks, the practical effect is a smaller menu of player props on NBA games, particularly the long-shot same-player combinations and bench-player unders that have been popular in same-game parlays.

The memo is not only about markets. The NBA also told teams it is expanding its AI-based monitoring of unusual betting patterns, bringing in former NFL player and retired FBI agent Charles Tillman to lead in-person training on betting rules, updating its fan code of conduct to address harassment by bettors, and adding a text-message hotline and a social media filtering service for players who receive threats.

The prediction market gap

There is an obvious hole in the policy. The NBA’s leverage comes from its contracts with licensed sportsbooks, and it has no formal partnership with any prediction market exchange.

Kaufman-Ross told ESPN the league weighed the whole betting landscape, including prediction markets, but acknowledged that enforcing these limits on exchanges would be difficult without an agreement. Gambling Insider reported that the league has held talks with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission about oversight of basketball event contracts, with no formal arrangement so far. Comparable player contracts could therefore remain available on federally regulated exchanges even as licensed sportsbooks drop them.

That gap is likely to come up again as the CFTC finalizes its new rules on event contracts and as states continue to challenge whether those exchanges should be subject to state gambling law at all.

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Sources

Michael Johnson

Michael Johnson is a senior copywriter and content strategist who has written for regulated gambling operators for close to a decade. He was a copywriter at The Rank Group in Gibraltar (2017-2019), a senior copywriter in the Ladbrokes Coral creative studio at Entain (2019-2021) and senior creative copywriter at Eyas Gaming (2021-2024), where he led messaging for gaming brands in regulated international markets and worked closely with compliance teams. Before that he wrote about videogames and esports for PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, Red Bull Esports and Kotaku UK. At Casinojournal he covers US gambling regulation, prediction markets, sports betting and sweepstakes casinos.

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