Ex-NBA Commissioner David Stern: ‘Time to Legalize Sports Betting’
Former NBA Commissioner David Stern is following in his replacement’s footsteps by suggesting that sports betting should finally be legalized.
Adam Silver was the first high profile sports executive to make that declaration last year.
Silver said last November in a New York Times opt-in piece:
There is an obvious appetite among sports fans for a safe and legal way to wager on professional sporting events. Mainstream media outlets regularly publish sports betting lines and point spreads. Voters in New Jersey overwhelmingly voiced their support for legal sports betting in a 2011 referendum….
Outside of the United States, sports betting and other forms of gambling are popular, widely legal and subject to regulation. In England, for example, a sports bet can be placed on a smartphone, at a stadium kiosk or even using a television remote control.
In light of these domestic and global trends, the laws on sports betting should be changed.
Those remarks raised eyebrows across all the professional sports leagues. Until now, Stern has remained mostly silent on the issue though he has invested in a Fantasy eSports company, AlphaDraft.
"I'm with Commissioner Silver," Stern told an audience at a forum in midtown Manhattan on the future of sports and digital media according to The Bergen Record. "There should be federal legislation that says, 'Let's go all the way' and have betting on sports. It's OK. It's going to be properly regulated."
“The only thing that makes sense for professional sports is to have federal legislation and regulation,” said Stern, who served as NBA commissioner from 1984 to 2014. “If it’s subject to 50 individual states, you have every state representative who thinks he has a perfect idea — that’s problematic.”
- Tyrone Black, Gambling911.com
