Restricted NBA Markets: A Victory For Sporting Integrity or Gambling Company Profits?
Image: Marius Christensen/Unsplash
The NBA announced new restrictions on the types of markets sportsbooks can offer this season. Restrictions are primarily aimed at markets that are susceptible to manipulation, such as unders on player props.
However, many bettors are disgruntled that this sets a dangerous precedent and will only lead to more profits for gambling companies and worse odds for gamblers.
The league distributed a memo to sportsbook partners on Friday directing them not to allow several bet types this season. These include:
- Parlays on player unders
- Under bets on players who are expected to play fewer than 12 minutes in a specific game
- Bets on the winner of the opening tip
- Players to miss specific shots
“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,” NBA executive vice president Scott Kaufman-Ross told ESPN. “And where we landed right now, we think, is the right balance of those two objectives.”
The restrictions come after high-profile match fixing scandals in the NBA and NCAA last season, which are still being dealt with in courts.
Bet365 Removes Unders Bets Completely
While NBA partners including FanDuel and DraftKings continue to offer unders lines on player props, other companies have removed the options completely.
Bet365, for example, has switched to offering ‘milestones’ rather than over/under lines. Bettors can wager on various total points, assists, and rebounds, but only that the player will have more than the set amount.
“Unfortunately our Trading Team have confirmed that we are not looking to offer Over/Under markets for the NBA at this time,” stated a customer support agent. “Should this change then this will be located on site.”
One bettor described it as “absolutely criminal” that bet365 had taken the decision not to offer the unders line on its player props.
“Betting is just constantly in decline right now and the books are doing as much as possible to make sure you stay a losing punter,” the user wrote in a post on X.
Prediction Markets Remove ‘No’ Options For General Users
Kalshi and Polymarket, whether under instruction from the league or not, are also not offering the under option on NBA player props. The NBA is reportedly close to agreeing partnerships with major prediction markets, although no official deals have been announced as yet.
Almost all markets on Kalshi come with yes/no options, but only more sophisticated traders accessing its API can take the other side of the ‘yes’ trade. As seen below, the ‘no’ option does not appear to general users.
Similarly, on Polymarket’s US platform, the ‘no’ option does not appear on NBA player props.
Other sports, including the NFL, do have both options. Polymarket also offers both sides on its international platform, in the traditional over/under format, although with very little liquidity.
Novig, which has set itself firmly against sportsbooks with its ‘just sports’ viral marketing campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney, continues to offer both sides.
Removing Unders Line Entirely Creates More Problems
Trevis Waters CEO of PlayerProps.ai, a platform designed to aid bettors, told Gaming America that he understood why the league was introducing restrictions, but added, “removing the under side of a market entirely is a different thing, and I think it creates more problems than it solves.”
He said it creates the following four problems:
1. Bettors get worse prices. A prop line is supposed to reflect two-way action. Take away the under and there is nothing pushing back on inflated overs. The public already leans toward overs, so books can shade those lines further and the bettor pays more for the same outcome.
2. The line stops telling the truth. Unders are how informed money corrects a bad number. On an exchange, the “no” side is literally the counterparty. A yes-only contract isn’t really a market. It’s a one-way ticket at whatever price the platform sets.
3. It pushes action where nobody is watching. Regulated books and exchanges are the league’s early-warning system. Their data is how suspicious patterns get flagged. If someone wants to bet an under and can’t do it legally, they go offshore, where there is no integrity monitoring at all. You end up with less visibility, not more.
4. It doesn’t close the loophole. A player who exits early still affects his teammates’ overs, team totals, and game totals. Someone with inside information will simply use a different market.
“The better path is targeted: stake limits on thin markets, minutes-based restrictions, tighter monitoring of low-salary and two-way players, and real data sharing between leagues, operators, and exchanges. Protect the game without breaking the markets that help police it,” Waters added.
Prediction Markets Criticized For Acting Like The House
“If there’s no house who is profiting when the overs don’t hit and who’s on the otherside of the over?” questioned one X user over prediction markets not offering both sides of the markets.
Market-making institutions put up the prices, in a similar way to sportsbooks setting lines. Prediction markets have frequently argued they are distinct from betting companies as they do not set the odds and users can take both sides, but the distinction is blurred in cases where only market makers are on the other side of users’ wagers.
DraftKings co-founder Matt Kalish publicly criticized Kalshi for its claims that it does not act as the house. He argued users are essentially betting against a house due to the presence of market makers.
States are now starting to target market makers in their legal fights against prediction markets. This week, Utah named Susquehanna, one of Kalshi’s most prominent market makers, and Kalshi Trading, the company’s in-house market maker in a lawsuit.
“Kalshi Trading, LLC and other Kalshi affiliates act as ‘market makers’—institutional bettors that establish the terms of the bets and collect winnings, like a traditional sportsbook, based on the outcome of the bets,” stated the complaint.
This is just one of many lawsuits against Kalshi and other prediction markets, with the legality of sports markets likely to be decided by the Supreme Court.
On the face of it, the user-driven pricing model of prediction markets seemingly offers users better prices, reducing the ‘house edge’. However, if more markets are restricted in the same way as NBA player props, the model looks more like a sportsbook and in the end, casual users, encouraged to wager on ‘sucker bets’ will be the ones losing out.
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