Betting a Bank Shot or a Bill
Basketball is on the brain in New York right now. It’s the NBA Finals, and the Knicks just won two games on the road. You can bet many ballers are banking on a great finale as the team heads back to the Big Apple.
In fact, based on the barrage of ads every game, the high rollers must be eyeing the sportsbooks for the biggest score.
And it makes me wonder who is going to pay the bill.
Follow the Money
When you think of New York City, it’s easy to think dollar signs. It’s the most expensive media market in the country, after all.
Now let’s consider this NBA Finals as a microcosm. The cheap seats for Game 3 of this marquee series are now running north of $7,500. That’s 150 percent more than an average month of rent in Manhattan. And if you want courtside seats, forget about it (fuhgeddaboudit). You’d need to shell out more than you would for a year of tuition a mile down the road at New York University.
The NYC mayor’s office last week said these final playoff games at Madison Square Garden could spur $263 million in economic activity in the city. But I think, if we really want to find the big money, we need to look at a different arena.
Sports betting is where the action is. Just follow the siren call of the “thrillionaires.”
According to the American Gaming Association (AGA), the national trade group for casinos and their partners, the gambling industry made $20 billion just in the first quarter of 2026. More than $4 billion of that revenue was generated from about $45 billion in sports bets. In 2025, the total take from sports betting was $16.96 billion pulled from $166.94 billion in bets. That helped fuel a record $78.72 billion overall for the industry.
I’m not sure which of those capital “B” billions should amaze me more—the revenue or the bets.
The gambling businesses (they prefer “gaming”) smell money in the water. And they’re not the only ones. The major sports leagues are “all in,” and currently 39 of 50 U.S. states have a piece of the action, too (bringing in $3.71 billion in taxes last year, according to the AGA).
The profits turned from sports betting certainly explain the deluge of ads we see everywhere during athletic events. And, as this recent in-depth Washington Post report suggests, they ARE everywhere.
“While the gambling industry was viewed by professional league owners and the NCAA as a grave threat a little over a decade ago, it is now so integrated with televised sports that it’s virtually unavoidable,” the Post found.
Those efforts must be paying off. A study published by Pew Research last year suggests 22 percent of U.S. adults are betting money on sports, a growing number being fueled by the rise of internet gambling. Apparently, now one-in-every-ten American adults is placing sports bets online.
Count the Cost
I can understand the allure of the dollar signs, though it makes me sad. It’s far from the good motivator story about one young man’s honorable approach to money that I wrote about last week.
I do think it’s worth remembering that these massive revenues relished by the leagues, the states, and the gambling industry are built on losses for their customers or constituents. How can that not erode trust in society, including the games themselves?
Also, there are behavioral dangers. The Mayo Clinic has compared gambling’s stimulation of the brain to that of drugs and alcohol—one that can lead to addiction. The clinic says, “If you have a problem with compulsive gambling, you may continually chase bets that lead to losses, use up savings and create debt. You may hide your behavior and even turn to theft or fraud to support your addiction.”
The National Council on Problem Gambling (which is financially supported by several of the biggest names in sports betting) suggests up to about 10 million American adults have some level of gambling problems. And it says problem gambling could be costing our communities billions of dollars in areas such as “gambling-related criminal justice and healthcare spending as well as job loss, bankruptcy, and other consequences.”
Online gambling can be particularly risky. I recall reading an article by one psychologist who said she had seen a shift in her clients struggling with gambling. More and more, they were likely to be young men in their 20’s enticed by gaming promotions during sporting events. They tended to be confident their sports knowledge would help them beat the odds, but, once drawn in, they found it difficult to escape.
“With most sportsbooks offering betting apps, my clients are finding it more difficult to quit gambling than ever before,” she wrote. “Unlike other forms of gambling, such as playing roulette or slots at a casino, these apps are on their phones and in their pockets, accompanying them wherever they go.”
Deteriorating Trust
Remember that Pew study? It’s notable to me that it also finds that 43 percent of Americans say legalized sports betting is bad for society, up from 34 percent in 2022. Even more striking, 47 percent (almost half) of men under age 30 think this. That’s more than double the 22 percent who said this in 2022!
This is especially interesting when you consider again that online bettors skew young and male. A quick Google search can pull more numbers for you, if you’re interested. But just take a look at the ads. Who do we think they’re targeting?
I’m not under 30, but I am male, so I suppose they’re hoping to pull me in. More concerning to me, however, is my worry about the effects of their ads on my sons.
I remember when this really caught my attention. I’m pretty cautious about what I watch on TV with my kids, but one day I found a soccer match that seemed like a fun and safe choice. Now the commercials are always risky. But I noticed something else. Everywhere I looked on the field during the game, I saw gambling promotions. And it wasn’t just billboards or brief pop-up ads on the screen. Every player had a uniform celebrating either Dafabet or Hollywoodbet — two global gambling companies.
How brazen… shameless, even. What are those placements communicating to my kids? What are they normalizing? I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. The teams, the league, the network… they all let me down. They all lost some trust that day.
And yet this bold betting bank shot is common among all the major sports now. Without coming to our senses, it seems like the societal bill is just going to grow.
Photo by Levi Grossbaum on Unsplash
