Eric Raskin, SportsHandle
Chris Boucher is the sixth man for the Toronto Raptors, a 20-minute-per-game role player on a .500, play-in-bound team. As NBA players go, he’s about as middle-of-the-road as they come. Nobody, not even the most hardcore basketball fan, should care much about Boucher’s nightly box scores.
But some people do care. Some people care way too much.
And according to Boucher, they’re using social media to let him know how much they care and are exposing themselves in the process as sports bettors with no sense of decency.
On his podcast Hustle Play with Chris Boucher, the Raptors power forward recalled a message he received on social media recently from an upset gambler who, by any reasonable standard, crossed the line.
“Somebody said, ‘I chose the wrong slave today.’ Literally, sent me that message. I had to read it, I couldn’t believe it,” Boucher explained. “He said, ‘I chose the wrong slave,’ because I had only five points and he needed me to score 10. So, yeah, it’s at this point now.”
Boucher set up the disturbing anecdote by saying of social media and the interactions between fans and athletes, “The betting is not going to make it better now, with the parlays and all that.”
At first glance, it may seem the reference to parlays was unnecessary — a losing sports bet is a losing sports bet, right?
But if, say, a gambler placed a six-leg single-game parlay on a Raptors game and five legs hit, and it was Boucher going under on points that prevented a 25/1 payout from coming in, then the sort of people who will vent at athletes and dabble in racism by calling them “slaves” could well be more likely to melt down than if they’d lost on a standard -110 wager.
Boucher’s podcast conversation was mostly about the general criticism he and other athletes endure on social media. It wasn’t all about sports bettors. But he brought bettors into it as a prominent part of the picture. And it serves as one more piece of striking anecdotal evidence that the combination of sports gambling and social media can be toxic.
And this — not an overabundance of TV ads, not misuse of the term “risk-free” — is the ugly side of sports betting that has the potential to bring the whole industry down.
Rest is here…
