Like everyone else, I will now forever remember Terry Rozier as a gambler. For the thrill of chance, he defected from the comfortable life he'd made with his skill, and blew up his NBA career over a stat-shaving racket worth dramatically less than his $25 million annual salary. It's already hard to look back at the world before Rozier entered infamy, but there was a time when I was sure he’d live on in basketball lore for a different, much better reason.
As a little-known player in his third year, Rozier became a shockingly effective postseason performer for the Boston Celtics. After Kyrie Irving suffered a season-ending injury in 2018, the Celtics were supposed to be toast. But the replacement squad—featuring the early ascendance of Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown—had other plans, and Rozier’s hot hand was a big part of their run to within one victory of the Finals. Rozier was especially memorable in their first-round victory over the Milwaukee Bucks, in which he badly outplayed Eric Bledsoe, and made sure everyone knew it by wearing a Drew Bledsoe, 1990’s-style New England Patriots football jersey into the arena during the series. It was an exceedingly mean thing to do, but he’d earned it, and the nickname “Scary Terry,” along the way.
Rozier doesn’t have a new nickname yet, but if he gets one, it won’t be as flattering. He was arrested by the FBI this past week, and brought in on game-fixing charges. Rozier, it is alleged, purposefully kept his stats below certain thresholds during certain games, and told a whole bunch of people to place big bets on exactly that happening. The league took notice when there was an unusual volume of action in this direction, and later announced an investigation into the incident. They eventually cleared him, allowing him to continue his career with the Miami Heat following a trade from the Charlotte Hornets less than a year later.
The FBI came to a different conclusion, however, and their findings are likely to keep Rozier off the floor for life. It’s a bit of common knowledge that the feds don’t bring in many people they can’t fully prove the guilt of; so common is their tendency to pursue only the legal fights that they know they can win that some in the inner circles of government call the strongest law enforcement agencies we have one big “chicken club.” Maybe things are different with a more gambit-friendly man in charge of everything (he’s currently making it clear how much he cares about precedent by demolishing a third of The White House), but even so, the dark P.R. cloud alone is probably enough to sink Rozier’s playing days.
Chauncey Billups’ story is much different, but you’re forgiven if you think it’s sort of the same, since Donald Trump’s FBI went out of their way to make it seem that way. Implying conspiratorial cohesion between Rozier, Billups, La Cosa Nostra, and dozens of other actors, their conspicuous press conference about massive illegal gambling activity just so happened to take place during the same week that the 2025-26 season began. Trump is a man of vengeance through media spectacle, and in his second presidency he’s been harsher than ever towards the people and organizations that have questioned his reign. First his FCC came for Jimmy Kimmel, putting Disney in the crosshairs, and now the league whose most famous player once called Trump a “bum” on Twitter is feeling his heat.
Billups, like Rozier, is looking like a casualty of this blitz. He doesn’t exactly sound innocent, either. Billups, per FBI filings, long took part in fixed poker games, standing in as the celebrity magnet used to draw big-money patsies to tables rigged with x-ray machines and overseen by special sunglasses that could read otherwise invisible marks on backs of cards—what has been alleged is a level of cheating that is hilarious in its opulence, unless you were the one getting played.
More seriously, for the NBA, is that Billups is—was, it seems—a head coach, who is also said to have spread information about player availability and (the lack of) the Portland Trail Blazers’ competitive priorities, for the purpose of bet-making. And this is where things get really complicated; the grey area everywhere, the line between the permissible and hard liability nearly impossible to keep sight of all the time. How, really, can we reliably distinguish excusable workplace talk with non-employees from illegal sharing of proprietary information?
This is not to say Billups, if guilty of what’s been accused, didn’t know what he was doing. But he is just one of countless NBA employees, all dealing with this jagged and ever-present ambiguity every day. Thinking about it as a moral issue, the legalized gambling industry brings plenty of baggage related to this never-ending calculus about what’s okay to say; but with a weaponized federal government hell-bent on culture-war victories against the NBA, this can of worms becomes a vat of snakes.
Lots of the media that dominates coverage of the league is constitutionally ill-equipped to report on this ongoing story. So much of their advertising revenue and analysis is wedded to a full-throated embrace of the betting industry. Social media users have been quick to point out the unending contradictions to their lens on the scandal, with betting ads removed mid-segment on ESPN, coaches declining to comment through FanDuel-sponsored microphones, and ad reads for DraftKings happening between podcast vignettes posturing about it all.
Like most of the American economy, the NBA sees itself in a place where it can’t go backwards to the point it strayed from a more material, less risky style of business, and will instead have to create a better appearance of control as its new, cruder kind of profit continues to grow dubiously, with little long-term stability in mind. The best guess they’ll be making, by staying attached to this increasingly volatile gambling behemoth, is that it’ll be safe enough to do so simply because the whole world is so steeped in a state of mutually assured destruction; you can’t come for our bad money, because you’ve got too much of your own.
Paradoxes only hurt if you’re short on power. Trump, with his logically fraught rise to unprecedented American royalty, is showing just that. And the NBA, despite his best and most jilted efforts to hurt it, is probably also Too Big To Fail. It can make its business muddier and less inspiring, but the expansion of the business seems to matter less to the league than whatever problems that expansion entails. The difficulties of its casino makeover are myriad, but they’re difficult in the way that complex terrain sometimes lies ahead in the path of a steamroller. Just make sure you know where it’s going, and don’t get yourself flattened—because it will, most assuredly, be going.