The NBA spent Monday doing two things at once: tightening the rules on betting and expanding its business in it. In a single round of announcements, the league unveiled "preferred" prediction-market partnerships with Kalshi and Polymarket, a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) governing those relationships, and an expansion of its existing DraftKings deal to include prediction markets — with more to come, the league said. At the same time, the NBA and a group of sportsbook operators agreed to ban several categories of bets, including certain parlay and player-prop wagers, in the wake of a gambling scandal that has already produced a criminal conviction.
The juxtaposition drew immediate notice. The Verge, in a sharply worded take, framed the news as the league's signature instinct: answering a gambling crisis by adding more gambling.
"From the bright minds that brought you FTX Arena and NBA Top Shot NFT marketplace" — The Verge
The outlet anchored that line with numbers from the league's NFT past: Top Shot sales fell to $762,781 last month, a 99.66 percent collapse from the February 2021 peak of $226,350,843. It is a reminder that the NBA's recent forays into speculative, hype-driven products have not aged well — FTX's naming-rights deal evaporated when the exchange filed for bankruptcy in November 2022.
What the league actually announced
The Monday package has several moving parts, and the various outlets covering it led with different ones:
- Prediction markets: Kalshi and Polymarket are now designated "preferred" partners of the NBA, a designation that typically carries marketing rights, official data access, and promotional integration across league broadcasts and digital properties.
- Regulatory oversight: A memorandum of understanding with the CFTC establishes a framework for how those prediction-market relationships will be managed — an unusual step that puts a federal regulator in the room with a sports league.
- DraftKings expansion: The league's existing sportsbook partnership now explicitly extends into prediction markets, and the NBA says additional announcements with other operators are coming.
- Betting restrictions: The NBA and multiple sportsbooks agreed to prohibit several bet types — most notably certain parlay combinations — that integrity monitors view as especially vulnerable to manipulation.
The scandals driving the crackdown
The restrictions did not arrive in a vacuum. The league is still managing fallout from the Jontay Porter case: the former Toronto Raptors center pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges after authorities said he manipulated prop bets on his own performance, part of a scheme prosecutors linked to organized gambling interests. Reports of mafia-linked betting activity around NBA prop markets have intensified scrutiny of the micro-betting products that have become among the most profitable offerings for sportsbooks.
The targeted bans focus on exactly those markets — low-limit, high-vig wagers on fringe players' individual statistics, and the same-game parlay structures that stitch several such props together. Integrity experts have long warned that bench players and two-way contract holders, whose statistical outputs are volatile and lightly scrutinized, are the softest targets for fixers. MSN's coverage emphasized that framing, headlining the deal as a response to the Porter scandal and to criminal betting networks rather than as a commercial maneuver.
Players push back
The commercial expansion has also landed awkwardly inside the locker room. Victor Wembanyama, the San Antonio Spurs star whose profile makes him one of the league's most valuable endorsement properties, said he will never endorse a gambling site, criticizing the league's deepening ties to the industry.
"I will never endorse gambling sites." — Victor Wembanyama
Kevin Durant publicly responded to Wembanyama's criticism, an exchange that quickly circulated among fans and reporters. Durant's own business portfolio has included a wide range of brand partnerships, and his reply highlighted a generational and philosophical split among players over where the line sits between a paycheck and a public-health problem. Poker and card-media outlets such as CardPlayer picked up Wembanyama's stance prominently, noting its resonance with an audience acutely sensitive to the difference between regulated gambling and its excesses.
Why it matters
Since the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, the NBA has moved from cautious partner to full participant. The league now takes equity stakes in operators, sells data rights, licenses its marks to sportsbooks, and integrates betting content into broadcasts. Prediction markets — which let users trade contracts on discrete events rather than place traditional fixed-odds bets — are the newest frontier, and their federal oversight by the CFTC (rather than state gaming commissions) creates a genuinely novel regulatory question for a sports league.
Critics see a structural conflict: the same league that polices game integrity now profits from betting volume on its games, including on the micro-markets most susceptible to abuse. The CFTC memo can be read as an attempt to answer that objection with process — a regulator with visibility into market design. The Verge's read is less generous, casting the whole sequence as brand management dressed up as governance.
What is not in dispute is the direction of travel. The NBA is not retreating from gambling revenue; it is renegotiating the terms on which it is collected, while asking fans and players to trust that the league can referee the game and sell it at the same time.
