It only took a league 55 words yesterday to announce one of its players would miss half the season in connection with the use of retail or online sports betting sites.
It’s true! Here’s the statement:
“The National Hockey League announced today that it has suspended NHL Player Shane Pinto for 41 games for activities relating to sports wagering.
The League’s investigation found no evidence that Pinto made any wagers on NHL games.
The NHL considers this matter closed, absent the emergence of new information, and will have no further comment.”
While Shakespeare once wrote that brevity is the soul of wit, I have doubts the NHL C-suite is full of "Hamlet" lovers. Moreover, I think the league’s response here is inadequate and should include much more context and information.
I doubt that disclosure is coming anytime soon, but it’s what I’d suggest, at any rate, because in the absence of further detail, legions of paranoid bettors and fans will speculate. The fact leagues like the NHL are business partners with sportsbook operators makes transparency more important here. The Ottawa Senators even have Betway on their home helmets as a sponsor.
There is cause for concern, but don't take it from me. Take it from Sportradar, an “official integrity partner” of the NHL, a company whose “universal fraud detection system” is used to help ensure the soundness of games around the world.
“If the integrity of a competition is called into question, then its reputation is harmed significantly, sometimes irreparably,” Sportradar said in its 2022 report on match-fixing and betting corruption. “This can have serious knock-on effects on fan participation, corporate sponsorship and media coverage.”
The NHL announced today that it has suspended Shane Pinto for 41 games for activities relating to sports wagering. https://t.co/AvOhmVCVOc pic.twitter.com/3jI32Wu4T2
— NHL Public Relations (@PR_NHL) October 26, 2023
Yet brevity looks like the M.O. here, unfortunately. Indeed, the collective bargaining agreement between the NHL and its players has only one line that could be considered a reference to legal sports betting: “Gambling on any NHL Game is prohibited.”
That short provision offers a lot of cover to NHL players to wager on other sports if they want. So what did Pinto, an unsigned member of the Senators, even do? If he wasn’t betting on NHL games, why such a sharp penalty?
Thankfully, we’ve got an ecosystem of NHL insiders filling in some of the blanks. Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman, citing sources, reported “one of the major issues leading to Pinto’s penalty was along the lines of ‘proxy betting,’ where another individual or individuals have access to a legal account in his name.”
Friedman noted sportsbooks and state regulators such as those in New Jersey frown on proxy betting. The Garden State’s sports wagering law, for instance, states operators shall not take bets from someone “who is an agent or proxy for any other person.”
Tell it to the tinfoilers
So is the NHL trying to be clever here by saying Pinto didn’t wager on any of its games while suspending him for a proxy doing so instead? I don’t know, but look at me, I’m speculating! If only someone had facts that could stop me from doing that.
Pinto reportedly will not appeal his penalty either, so what is the obstacle to a more fulsome statement of the facts? An agreement between the parties to withhold that information? Ah, dang, more speculation. My bad!
Let’s step back from this specific case and consider the broader context. We live in a world that loves a good conspiracy, and sports bettors are helping to send the children of tinfoil sellers to college. A weird outcome is enough to get social media screaming about leagues and the books being in cahoots.
Public opinion surveys also suggest at least some people see sports betting as having the potential to undermine the integrity of events.
A 2019 poll done for Axios found that 43% of respondents agreed the legalization of sports betting in the U.S. would negatively affect the integrity of sports. A more recent and, granted, a smaller survey done for Covers found that around 30% of Kentuckians it queried were at least somewhat worried that legal sports betting in their backyard could undermine the quality of competition.
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Borrowing from the NFL's script
Such is the level of paranoia in the sports world that the National Football League even runs ads joking about how everything is scripted. The NFL has also had several sports betting-related scandals come its way recently. And while I’m loath to give the league any credit, there’s at least a little bit more information offered when the hammer falls. For example, the Detroit Lions noted in April that wide receiver Jameson Williams was being suspended “for other gambling policy violations, including betting from an NFL facility on non-NFL games.”
It’s not a blow-by-blow account of what happened, but at least we knew WHY Williams was suspended. That’s more than we can say about the NHL right now, even if we might be able to piece together what did occur from media reports.
"I want to apologize to the National Hockey League, the Ottawa Senators, my teammates, the fans and city of Ottawa and most importantly my family," Pinto said in a statement. "I take full responsibility for my actions and look forward to getting back on the ice with my team."
Another Hamlet reference
But what were those actions?
If professional sports leagues want to profit from legal sports betting, they need to get smarter about how they deal with controversies caused or caught by the expansion and increased availability of wagering. People can hop on their phones from anywhere and place a bet, and that includes the athletes themselves. When players or coaches or executives or whoever runs afoul of betting rules (and while this is the NHL's first such controversy in the modern wagering world, it probably won't be its last), it’s not enough to merely say games weren’t affected.
In the absence of information, there can be misinformation, and telling bettors and fans, “Move along, nothing to see here, folks” is disrespectful. Sports betting is supposed to help heighten interest in a league, but then these same leagues embracing gambling act like they want that interest to temporarily dissipate when there’s scandal in the air.
Even if you can’t say anything, maybe just say that, otherwise there will be people who suspect there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. Maybe silence won’t undermine the integrity of sports overnight, but it could chip away, and who knows where we’ll be five, 10, or 20 years from now.
Ah, but that's more speculation. Sorry.
