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Two days after the NBA opened its season, federal authorities arrested more than 30 people, including Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, as part of a multiyear investigation into illegal betting activities.
The indictment involves multiple cases, one of which is related to illegal sports betting. NBA players and coaches are alleged to have passed information to bettors, who put money on prop bets and other wagers related to NBA games, according to the indictments.
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It is another example of how sports betting can be vulnerable to fraud, especially as the multi-billion-dollar industry continues to grow rapidly. (The Athletic has a partnership with BetMGM.)
What about the NHL? How does gambling work in hockey games, and is the league susceptible to problems in this area?
To be clear, these cases announced on Thursday don’t involve hockey or the NHL in any way. Still, they raise questions about the steps the league has taken to prevent anything similar from happening in hockey, especially given how integrated sports betting has become with the league’s television product, and how secretive teams are regarding player injuries.
“Because of its importance, this is an area we have been hyper-focused on for the past several years,” Bill Daly, deputy commissioner and chief legal officer of the NHL, wrote in an email to The Athletic. “We have consistently increased our educational efforts, and have continued to add structural resources to ensure the continuing integrity of our game. Today’s events are an unfortunate reminder to all of us as to just how critical those efforts are to our business.”
Sports wagering has become an increasingly bigger part of hockey, as it has in most professional sports over the last several years. Many broadcasts feature betting lines more regularly. Wayne Gretzky and Connor McDavid starred in a commercial for BetMGM that began airing in 2022. McDavid has since been featured in a commercial advocating for responsible gambling.
Of the four highest-profile professional team sports in North America, hockey is the least wagered on, and arguably the least understood. Here are the most common ways for bettors to wager on hockey:
Moneyline bet: This is the simplest form of wagering. A bettor simply chooses which team will win a particular game. Unlike in football and basketball, there are no handicaps or point spreads to factor in. The oddsmakers set moneyline odds for each team, presented with a plus (+) or minus (-) sign to indicate the underdog and favorite. A $100 wager on a plus-165 underdog would yield a $165 win. Similarly, a $165 wager on a minus-165 favorite would yield a $100 win.
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Puckline bet: This is as close as hockey gets to using point spreads. These wagers add a 1.5-goal handicap to the wager, so a bet on a favorite cashes only if the team wins by two or more goals. Bettors can also bet on the underdog plus-1.5 goals. In that case, the bet cashes if the underdog wins the game outright, or loses by only one goal.
Totals: Bettors can wager on the total number of goals scored in any particular game. This number is typically between 5.5 goals and 6.5 goals, depending on how offensively or defensively inclined the teams are.
Partial game wagers: Many betting sites and sportsbooks now allow bettors to wager on the score at the end of a period, rather than just the final score. These bets work the same way as the full-game moneyline, puckline and total bets, but are won or lost earlier in the contest.
Individual prop bets: The newest, fastest-growing form of sports wagering relates to individual players’ statistics. Bettors can now wager on which player will score the first goal of a particular game, or if a player will score a goal at all. They can also wager on whether a player will hit a certain threshold in several other statistics, including assists, shots on goal, blocks and saves for goaltenders.
Future bets: Bettors can also wager that teams will hit milestones throughout the season. Wagers can be made that a team will win the Stanley Cup, win their conference, qualify for the playoffs or hit a point total for the entire season. Similarly, wagers can be made on individual players winning end-of-season awards, or hitting specific statistical thresholds such as goals or points.
The most obvious gambling-related issues involve how secretive NHL clubs are when it comes to disclosing injuries. Unlike the NFL, which requires teams to abide by specific rules when disclosing injuries, the NHL mostly leaves it up to the discretion of individual clubs.
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In the NFL, teams must detail a player’s status by specific deadlines throughout the week. They report specifics about the injury location and severity, with violations resulting in significant fines, suspensions and/or the loss of draft picks. Within games, teams must disclose injury information immediately to the broadcast and other media, as well as display it on video boards inside the stadium.
In the NHL, teams often don’t disclose details about injuries until several days after they occurred. Even then, it’s typically a vague “lower-body” or “upper-body” injury designation. Sometimes even that much isn’t given, and the injury is simply “undisclosed.”
The NHL also doesn’t have a uniform scale for injury severity, as does the NFL, which forces teams to designate a player as “questionable,” “doubtful,” or “out” for an upcoming game. Teams in the NHL will often announce a player is “day to day” with an injury, only for them to miss weeks (or sometimes months) of action.
Why does this all matter? The more information that is withheld by the team and not announced to the general public, the more opportunities that could arise for certain individuals who do have access to that information to use it to their advantage in the world of sports betting.
In the alleged NBA betting scheme that was unearthed on Thursday, individuals were allegedly weaponizing what law enforcement officials called “non-public information” about which players were and weren’t playing in future games. Games were bet on because bettors found out that players would sit out.
In hockey, which has more players as part of the game action, the availability of one player arguably impacts the outcome of a game less than it does in basketball. But what about the player prop bets? If a player is nursing an injured wrist that hasn’t been disclosed to the public, illegally informed bettors could use that information to bet the under on a player’s goals or shots on goal. These are hypotheticals, of course, but they should be considered in the quickly expanding landscape of sports betting.
To this point, the NHL and NHL Players’ Association have shown little interest in changing the rules surrounding injury disclosure. In June, the sides agreed on a new four-year collective bargaining agreement that runs through the 2029-30 season, and no changes were made to the injury policies.
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The league prohibits not only its players, but also all team and league staff — including those who keep statistics — from betting on hockey. In 2023, the NHL handed out the fourth-longest suspension in the league’s history to Senators forward Shane Pinto for “activities related to sports wagering.” Even in that situation, details weren’t disclosed by the league or by Pinto, other than the league stating it “found no evidence that Pinto made any wagers on NHL games.”
It also should be noted that any type of conspiracy in hockey betting would be easier for investigators to spot. While specific figures are not available, hockey games are known to draw far fewer wagers than those on football, basketball or baseball games. Someone taking advantage of insider information to make large amounts of money in hockey would stand out to a much greater extent.
Still, as Daly noted, it’s an issue never far from the minds of NHL leadership — and it’s likely to get even more complicated with time.
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Jesse Granger is a staff writer for The Athletic NHL based in Las Vegas covering the Golden Knights and goaltending across the league. He has covered the Golden Knights since its inception and was previously an award-winning reporter for the Las Vegas Sun. Follow Jesse on Twitter @JesseGranger_
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