NBA hopes for a sports betting federal regulation

A commissioner of the sports league said that the NBA is hopeful that the US will come up with a federal model.

US.- Mark Tatum, deputy commissioner and chief operating officer of the National Basketball League (NBA), has revealed that the league is hopeful that the United States will reach a federal regulatory scheme for sports betting.

While speaking at the Fiba World Basketball Summit, Tatum said that a federally regulated model would be easier to manage and simpler to keep track of the activity and maintain the integrity of the league, instead of the current system in place that allows each state to come up with their own regulation, Sportbusiness revealed.

“There’s been some recent interest by the federal government, who have indicated that they think maybe there should be some broad set of federal regulations which we would obviously be in support of,” Tatum said.

The commissioner also talked about the recent partnership between the NBA and MGM, and said that the league prefers that all match data used by operators in the sports betting business should be officially licenced by the NBA. He said the partnership would allot them to monitor betting activity.

“That partnership is really about the use of our NBA intellectual property, and the use of official NBA data, ensuring that the fans and the consumers who utilize and who bet on sports legally at MGM are getting access to official data,” he said. “There are protections in place and the sharing of information and data with MGM is going to help us identify if there are any potential issues that we need to be aware of.”

“There’s a use of intellectual property for them to say: ‘come here to place your bets because we’re using NBA official data, we are an Official Sports Betting Partner of the NBA’. So when you’re a consumer, you can say: ‘that’s a credible place for me to be able to place a safe bet’.”