NBA Commissioner to Chris Christie: Join Me to Expand Sports Betting

With both powerful men calling for expanded legalized sports gambling, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is inviting New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to join him in lobbying Congress to rewrite federal laws on the subject.

The NBA and the other major professional sports leagues are actually fighting New Jersey in court to enforce a federal ban on most sports betting outside of Nevada. That law has been in place for more than two decades.

But during an interview on ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” that also aired on the ESPN/ABC podcast “Capital Games,” Silver said that rather than fight New Jersey and other states, his league can work with them to establish a uniform federal structure that would acknowledge that sports gambling already takes place in many venues that are far from Las Vegas sports books.

“Governor Christie, and I’m happy to join him, should turn his attention to Washington, DC, to Congress, and say, ‘Here are all the reasons it should be regulated, but let’s come up with a framework that makes sense on a national basis presumably that would allow states to opt in,’ ” Silver told ESPN’s Andy Katz.

Silver broke with his fellow American sports commissioners last month by endorsing expanded legal sports gambling in a New York Times op-ed. He told Katz that his intention was to “break the ice” to have a real conversation on the subject.

 

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