Former NBA Commissioner David Stern has softened his stance on sports betting

Richard N. Velotta, Review Journal

For years, former National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern believed being associated with gambling would hurt the integrity of professional sports.

He even testified on behalf of NBA star-turned-senator Bill Bradley’s Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), which became law in 1992 and prevented sports wagering from expanding beyond four states that already had some version of it, including Nevada, the only state with legal race and sports books.

 

But over time, Stern began to change his outlook on gambling, describing that journey in a one-hour talk Thursday with American Gaming Association President and CEO Geoff Freeman just before the close of the four-day Global Gaming Expo at The Venetian.

  

Several sessions at G2E, the world’s largest gaming industry convention attended by more than 25,000 people, focused on the debate over whether sports wagering should be expanded nationwide.

The Gaming Association has made the issue one of its political priorities and now has Stern on board as an advocate.

 

“Early on, we realized that this idea that gambling is bad — it’s a Nevada-regulated industry — and that it’s going to lead to bad things got to be an outdated notion as we learned more about illegal gaming and the size of the market,” Stern said in a question-and-answer format with Freeman. “That’s why we said ‘Let’s not talk as much as the leagues do about the evils of gambling and what’s going to happen,’ because we could really take care of ourselves.

 

“Over time, I’ve come to accept the notion that a properly run gambling operation, or gaming as we like to say in Las Vegas, is protective and not deleterious to the health of sports,” Stern said.

Rest is here…