NBA Wants Sportsbooks to Stop Accepting Certain Bets and Limit Parlays

The NBA is asking authorized gambling operators, including FanDuel and DraftKings, to stop offering certain bet types it sees as problematic and to limit player prop parlays. For sportsbooks and prediction markets, the issue is less about product design and more about where the league thinks the integrity risk starts.

1. On Friday, October 16, the NBA distributed a memo to authorized gambling operators calling for a ban on specific sports betting markets. The league is targeting wagers it says create integrity concerns, including bets on the winner of the opening tip, specific shots, and under bets on players expected to play fewer than 12 minutes in a specific game.
2. The memo, seen by ESPN, also says bettors won’t be able to include the under on the same player’s statistics in parlays. That matters because player prop parlays are among the most popular products on sportsbook menus, and the NBA is specifically trying to narrow the set of bets that can be bundled together.
3. NBA executive vice president Scott Kaufman-Ross told ESPN the league is trying to strike a balance between removing “problematic bet types” and avoiding a shift into the illegal market. He said: “Where we landed right now, we think, is the right balance of those two objectives.”
4. Kaufman-Ross also said the league spent a long time discussing which bets should be prohibited and described “low likelihood, high payout bets” as a key target. He drew a comparison to the Jontay Porter and Terry Rozier saga, where NBA-related conduct created opportunities for third parties to profit from game outcomes.
5. The NBA says these measures are meant to apply universally across platforms, including prediction market platforms, but enforcement is a different story. Kaufman-Ross acknowledged that without actual partnerships in place, making that happen is difficult. FanDuel told ESPN it was prepared to comply and said the legalized betting industry was built on a “foundation of dialogue.”

The broader context is simple enough: the NBA is now trying to influence not just sportsbook pricing and bet menus, but also the edges where prediction markets and sports event contracts start to look like the same plumbing with different labels.