The Battle over prediction markets, and their place in the gaming ecosystem, continues to heat up at the NBA Joins the fight. Earlier this week the NBA sent a letter to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) expressing the organizations thoughts on predictions markets. Like other predictions market critics, the NBA sees them as basically unlicensed sportsbooks. In an interesting twist, the NBA’s critique focused on their threat to very integrity of the game.
The letter, addressed to CFTC Acting Director Caroline Pham from NBA Vice President and Assistant General Counsel Alexandra Roth focused on how prediction markets have moved from full-season predictions to single game predictions. Roth focused further on the impact a move towards player prop bets on prediction markets.
“The integrity risks posed by sports prediction markets are more significant and more difficult to manage than those presented by legal, regulated sports gambling,” she said.
Roth, as reported on by PublicGaming.com, joined the chorus of critics suggesting that predictions markets are simply unregulated sportsbooks saying, “If the CFTC does ultimately decide to permit the continued offering of sports event contracts, we encourage it to close this gap and to adopt a comprehensive regulatory and oversight framework analogous to those governing state sports betting markets, and to impose meaningful limitations on the continued expansion, via self-certification, of these markets into ever more exotic and narrow event propositions.”
It’s worth noting that the NBA has long been considered the most sports betting-friendly professional sports league, and was the first US sports league to promote regulated sports betting. Whether or not the letter has any impact with the CFTC remains to be seen.