NBA Commissioner Adam Silver got headlines when he recently came out in favor of legalized sports betting—the first commissioner of a major sports league to do so.
But at the NBA’s recent all-star game festivities, it became apparent that many of the NBA’s franchise owners agree with him. Several owners said it was time to consider a federal law to regulate sports according to a report in Newsday.
“We’ve always been hypocritical saying we didn’t realize it was a big part of interest in the game,” Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban told Newsday. “When you do any work on where people are actually gambling, it’s all overseas and places we can’t see, and the league has got to monitor all these third-party betting sites and that makes it a lot tougher. By bringing it where we can see it, you reduce a lot of the risk that something bad can happen.”
Los Angeles Lakers president Jeanie Buss said, “It already exists now, so as a league we’re behind our commissioner in the process of supporting legalization on a federal level. We want to see him accomplish that goal, because we feel that any engagement with the fans is a positive. If our fans are already doing it, then it should be something that’s brought out into the mainstream and it should be regulated.”
The league has already begun partnering with daily fantasy sites such as FanDuel and DraftKings. The NBA signed a partnership deal with FanDuel in November and secured an equity position in the site.
“It was good to have them as partners and even better to have them as a shareholder; it was a real endorsement of what we were doing,” FanDuel CEO Nigel Eccles told the paper. “We benefit from that partnership but then we drive so much benefit back. We’re driving 1.5 million more viewers to the NBA every week, just from our user base.”
Meanwhile, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred also continues to talk about legalized sports betting.
“I give Adam Silver a lot of credit for starting the debate,” Manfred said at a recent conference and according to Bloomberg News. “Without embracing everything he said, certainly the idea of having a federal system to govern gambling—whatever that system is—uniformity at a federal level seems like a pretty good idea to me.”
Silver originally penned an op/ed piece in the New York Times saying he feels legalized sports betting should be put in place, but regulated at a federal level. Silver said it would help curtail illegal betting and generate interest in the NBA.
