The NBA has asked its sportsbook partners to stop offering a specific set of bets this season, and the logic behind the list is the whole story. In a memo distributed on October 16, 2026, and reported by ESPN, the league targeted the markets most vulnerable to manipulation by a single player: parlays that include the under on a player's own statistics, under bets on players expected to play fewer than 12 minutes, alternate-line unders with outsized payouts, bets on the winner of the opening tip, and bets that a player will miss specific shots. The common thread is that an individual can quietly deliver an "under" in a way he can never deliver a team result.
That is not a hypothetical concern. The restrictions follow the federal cases against Jontay Porter and Terry Rozier, in which prosecutors alleged players tanked their own prop numbers so bettors could cash unders (the league had already banned unders on two-way contract players after the Porter scheme). Scott Kaufman-Ross, the NBA's executive vice president overseeing the effort, framed it as a trade-off, saying there is "a balance between ensuring that we are removing problematic bet types" while keeping a product fans want. Rozier has pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.
What actually changes for bettors
If you bet the NBA, the menu is smaller this season. The sportsbooks affected are the league's authorized partners, which account for upward of 99% of the US betting market and include DraftKings and FanDuel. DraftKings said several of the restrictions already match its own practices and that it supports the effort; FanDuel offered a general statement backing a regulated market. In practice that means the low-minute-player unders and the deep alternate-line unders, the "low likelihood, high payout" bets the memo singles out, largely disappear, along with opening-tip and miss-the-shot markets. The league is also expanding AI-based monitoring of unusual betting and rolling out in-person integrity training for players.
The prediction-market gap
There is one obvious hole, and the NBA admits it. These rules bind licensed sportsbooks because the league has commercial relationships with them. It has no such relationship with prediction markets, so Kaufman-Ross acknowledged that enforcing the same limits on Kalshi, Polymarket, and the rest "could be challenging." That is the same gap the NFL pointed to when it asked the Supreme Court to let states regulate event contracts, and the same reason this fight keeps circling back to who, exactly, is allowed to police these markets. A sportsbook can be told to drop a bet type overnight; a federally registered exchange cannot.
Our take
This is about as targeted as integrity policy gets, and it is hard to argue with the design. The markets being cut are precisely the ones a compromised player can move on his own, and the ones that have already shown up in federal indictments; the markets left alone, team sides and totals, take real coordination to rig. For bettors the honest framing is that you are losing some of the thinnest, highest-variance props, which is not much of a loss. The more interesting part is the admission underneath it all: the league can lean on its sportsbook partners, but it cannot reach the prediction markets now taking NBA action, which is exactly why the leagues have thrown their weight behind state regulation. Integrity rules only work on the operators who agree to follow them.