Former NBA player Jontay Porter, who has already been banned from the league, revealed on Wednesday that he plotted to skip games to gamble.
The former center for the Toronto Raptors pleaded guilty to conspiracy to conduct wire fraud, saying: “I know what I did was wrong, unlawful, and I am deeply sorry.”
Jontay Porter admitted that he allowed himself to leave games early so that accomplices could profit from wagers on his performance, confirming conclusions from an NBA investigation and accusations in the current prosecution of four other men.
According to him, he took this action “to get out from under large gambling debts.”
In anticipation of his December 18 sentence, Porter, 24, is free on a $250,000 bond.
He informed the court that he is still receiving therapy after completing in-patient treatment for his gambling issue.
In a related instance, four additional individuals are accused of plotting to take advantage of an NBA player’s tip that he would leave the game two games early.
One of the four men allegedly put pressure on the player to pay off debts from gambling by leaving games early in order to profit from bets on him performing poorly.
The player replied to the man’s instructions with a message saying that he would be traveling to Toronto to beat him up if he didn’t follow out the plan because “u hate me and if I don’t get u 8k by Friday.”
The player withdrew from the Jan. 26 and March 20 games after spending just a few minutes on the court, claiming to be injured or ill after giving some of the guys a gratuity, according to the complaint.
Porter only played a short while on those dates before leaving the games to protest that he was ill or injured.
In both games, his assists, rebounds, and points fell short of what the bookies had predicted.
A portion of the accused conspirators allegedly consented in advance to give the player a quarter of any wins from the game on March 20.
A gambler was almost certain to win over $1 million when a betting company became suspicious and withheld the majority of the winnings from him.
The player messaged some men that they “might just get hit with a rico,” which refers to the common abbreviation for a federal racketeering charge after the NBA and others started looking into the matter, according to the lawsuit against them.
The player reportedly asked the lads if they had erased “all the stuff” from their phones.
Jontay Porter played in 26 games this season, five of which he started, and averaged 4.4 points, 3.2 rebounds, and 2.3 assists.
During the 2020–21 season, he also appeared in 11 games for the Memphis Grizzlies.
According to later reports, the lawyer released a statement last month, claiming that Porter “was in over his head due to a gambling addiction.” According to the league, he once wagered against his own club.