A head coach involved in poker games rigged by mobsters?<\/p>\n
A 10-year NBA veteran benching himself for the sake of lucrative prop bets?<\/p>\n
An 11-year NBA veteran and former coach with ties to the league\u2019s most glamorous franchise (the Los Angeles Lakers) and to one of its all-time great players (James) selling inside information to professional gamblers?<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fraud is mind-boggling,\u201d FBI Director Kash Patel said.<\/p>\n
But it is not shocking. Not even close. Years ago, I interviewed members of the 1949-50 City College of New York basketball team that won the NCAA and NIT championships in the same season before their historic feat was forever marred by a point-shaving scandal. Players from schools around the city were shaving and dumping. Floyd Layne, the CCNY star, took a few thousand dollars from gamblers and hid most of it in a flower pot.<\/p>\n
Norm Mager, the CCNY sixth man who had first introduced teammates to a fixer, told me it was a fairly easy call at the time. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have to lose games,\u201d he said, \u201cjust win by fewer points. It sounded good to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
All these decades later, these Faustian deals are still being made.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A head coach involved in poker games rigged by mobsters? A 10-year NBA veteran benching himself for the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":236945,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,459,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-236944","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-nba","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236944\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}