Hours after the FBI arrested Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups, and published a pair of indictments detailing the former’s alleged involvement in a cooked prop-bet unders scheme and the latter’s alleged involvement in a rigged mafia poker game, the sports-watching public turned to sports media to help make sense of the story. They found a press corps telling them that the probable sudden end of a coach’s career and the unearthing of a gambling ring were mere growing pains for an industry just getting its feet under it. Actually, they said, some good might come of this.
“If gambling’s gonna be more and more prevalent, we’re probably gonna have a couple bad apples,” said Bill Simmons the day the story broke. “Everybody’s gonna learn how to behave and deal with it.” After his guest searched for the word “constrict” for 30 seconds in service of a point about how the gambling companies could solve their problems by simply constricting available prop bets, Simmons noted, “We’ve always been doing this. We’re more honest about it now. And in the process of being more honest about it, I think there’s gonna be a couple hiccups that ultimately, that if we can police all this … it’s gonna be a plus, not a minus.”
