As someone who played in the NBA for 19 years and has coached ever since retiring, Jason Kidd knows it’s a “beautiful game” at its best.
And the Mavericks’ head coach doesn’t want the recent gambling scandals — which involved Heat guard Terry Rozier, Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and former player Damon Jones getting arrested over alleged roles in illegal sports betting and poker schemes — to take away from some of the individual performances around the league to start the season.
“What I will say is we have a beautiful game with a lot of talented players in this league,” Kidd told reporters Friday while declining to specifically comment on the scandal, according to the Dallas Morning News. “The start of the season, we’ve had an MVP (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander) score 55 points. We got to see up-close Victo (Webanyama) score 40 points. Hopefully that doesn’t overshadow what these young men are doing because it’s a beautiful game.
“They’re playing the game at a high level, and it’s fun to be a part of. Hopefully they can get that fixed.”
Kidd was referencing Thunder superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s 55-point eruption against the Pacers on Thursday and Spurs superstar Victor Wembanyama’s 40-point night in a season-opening win against the Mavericks.
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But in between those games, an ugly scandal overshadowed anything that transpired on the court during the first week of the season — with a total of 34 people arrested following the pair of investigations, including the three with ties to the NBA, into schemes with alleged ties to the Mafia.
Billups and Rozier were both put on leave by the NBA, with Billups allegedly serving as a “face card” in the rigged high-stakes poker games and Rozier allegedly providing insider information used in the illegal betting scheme.
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Jim Trusty, Rozier’s attorney, accused the FBI of wanting “the misplaced glory of embarrassing a professional athlete with a perp walk,” while Chris Heywood, Billups’ lawyer, described his client as a “man of integrity” who “would not jeopardize those things for anything, let alone a card game.”
But it placed the complicated relationship between the professional sports leagues and its relationship with online sports gambling back into the spotlight.
The FBI has arrested 31 people involved in a rigged poker game ring backed by the New York City organized crime families.
- Ernest Aiello — reputed Bonanno mobster
- Nelson “Spanish G” Alvarez
- Louis “Lou Ap” Apicella
- Ammar “Flapper Poker” Awawdeh
- Saul Becher — professional poker player
- Chauncey Billups — Portland Trail Blazers coach, NBA Hall of Famer and 2004 NBA champion
- Matthew “The Wrestler” Daddino
- Eric “Spooky” Earnest
- Lee Fama — professional poker player
- John Gallo
- Marco Garzon
- Thomas “Tommy Juice” Gelardo — reputed Lucchese mobster charged in 2013 for beating porn star girlfriend
- Jamie Gilet
- Tony “Black Tony” Goodson
- Kenny Han
- Shane “Sugar” Henne
- Osman “Albanian Bruce” Hoti
- Horatio Hu
- Zhen “Scruli” Hu
- Damon “Dee Jones” Jones — NBA player from 1998 to 2009
- Joseph Lanni
- John “John South” Mazzola
- Curtis Meeks
- Nicholas Minucci
- Michael Renzulli
- Anthony Ruggiero Jr.
- Anthony “Doc” Shnayderman
- Robert “Black Rob” Stroud
- Seth Trustman
- Sophia “Pookie” Wei
- Julius Ziliani
“The league does an incredible job of talking about that,” Kidd told reporters when asked about the heightened pressure players face from fans in the online sports betting era. “There’s a lot of literature that goes out. The league has done a great job of teaching and showing and now we have real-life examples. We’ll learn from this and be better.”
Kidd addressed the scandal before the Mavericks’ 117-107 loss to the Wizards on Friday, which dropped them to 0-2 to start the season.
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