Match Fixing in Basketball: Point Shaving from CCNY to the NBA

Jontay Porter didn't last long against Sacramento on 20 March 2024. He left the Toronto Raptors' game early, citing illness, and on most nights nobody outside Toronto would have given it a second thought. Porter was on a two-way contract. He was a fringe name on the roster, not a star, and his numbers barely registered.

Somebody was paying attention, though. That same day, at a DraftKings sportsbook in an Atlantic City casino, an $80,000 parlay went on his player props. It stood to return about $1.1 million.

Nobody puts that kind of money on a bench player's stat line without a reason, and the bookmakers knew it. DraftKings refused to pay and froze the account. DraftKings and FanDuel reported the betting to the NBA and the International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA), the FBI was called in, and on 17 April 2024 the league banned Porter for life.

It feels like a scandal made for the smartphone age. The idea underneath it is as old as the betting line, though. A player makes sure the numbers come up short, and nobody has to throw a game for the money to land. Basketball first learned that lesson on a grand scale in 1951, when the best college team in America turned out to be part of it.

This is the basketball chapter of our match fixing in sport series. It runs from the CCNY scandal to the federal indictments of October 2025 and January 2026, and finishes with what it all means for anyone who bets on the game.

Point shaving: miss the spread, don't lose the game

Basketball's classic fix comes with its own name. In point shaving, a gambler pays players not to lose, but to win by less than the point spread, or to lose by more than it. A team favoured by ten that wins by six has still won. The fans go home happy, the result stands, and anyone who bet against the spread collects.

That's the poison in it. A player can tell himself he isn't really cheating. The Boston College players of 1978-79 were sold exactly that line; in Henry Hill's telling, it was about "shaving, not blowing games". It's a close cousin of the spot-fixing that has haunted cricket and football, which we cover in football's fixing scandals, except that here the fix hides inside the final margin.

Props and inside information

Legal sports betting in the United States has opened up a newer weak spot. Player-prop markets on points, rebounds, assists and minutes mean a fixer doesn't need to touch the margin at all. One player leaving a game early can be enough, and he doesn't have to be a star. Baseball has faced the same questions, as we explore in baseball's fixing scandals.

Then there's information. Knowing that a key player is injured before the market does is valuable on its own, and it sits at the heart of the allegations in the October 2025 NBA indictments.

Why the sport is a target

We'd pick out four reasons basketball is unusually vulnerable:

• One player matters. Five on court and a high-scoring game mean one or two players can shift the margin without any visible effort to lose.
• The spread lowers the moral bar. Shaving points feels smaller than throwing a game, and that makes it an easier sell.
• College players are the softest target. For most of the sport's history the college stars were unpaid, and the 2026 allegations centre on college players once again.
• One referee makes a lot of calls. The Tim Donaghy case turned officials into a front-line integrity concern.

Seventy-five years of scandal, from the New York college game to the modern NBA. The two most recent entries are allegations, and they're labelled that way.

The grand-slam champions

No team had ever done what the 1949-50 City College of New York Beavers did. They won the 1950 NCAA tournament and the 1950 NIT in the same season. Within a year, that grand slam was tainted.

Between 1947 and 1950, gamblers had been paying college players to shave points. The arrests came in 1951, and by the time Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan closed the investigation on 27 October 1951, the scale was staggering. Thirty-five players from seven colleges admitted taking bribes to fix 86 games in 17 states. CCNY had plenty of company: Manhattan, NYU, Long Island University, Toledo, Bradley and Kentucky.

Nobody could say there hadn't been a warning. On 29 January 1945, five Brooklyn College players were arrested after confessing to taking $1,000 each to throw games.

The sentences

Judge Saul S. Streit handled most of the sentencing. The fixer, Salvatore Sollazzo, got 8 to 16 years in state prison and served 12. Seven CCNY players were sentenced, with terms running from suspended sentences to six months. Sherman White of LIU got a year in prison while his team-mates' sentences were suspended, and historians have since questioned whether his race played a part in that harsher treatment.

Elsewhere, the outcomes were all over the place. Manhattan's players got three years' probation from Judge James M. Barrett. At Bradley, Mike Chianakas, Gene Melchiorre and Bill Mann pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour, while the other Bradley players were acquitted. At Toledo, a defendant, Eli Kukofsky, died before his trial ended and all charges against the Toledo players were dropped. An NBA referee who had been an accomplice was jailed for three years, reduced to a suspended sentence on appeal, and fired.

The fallout

All 35 players were permanently banned from the NBA. CCNY was banned from playing at Madison Square Garden, though head coach Nat Holman and assistant Bobby Sand were cleared of any wrongdoing.

Judge Streit wasn't content with punishing the players. Sentencing the Kentucky players on 29 April 1952, he issued a 63-page report calling the university's athletic department "highly systematized, professionalized, and commercialized", and he criticised Bradley's president and boosters too. More than seven decades on, it still reads like a verdict on college sport.

The scheme

Rocco and Tony Perla dreamed up the Boston College scheme in Pittsburgh in the summer of 1978. BC players would get $500 to $1,000 a game, plus a chance to bet, to keep the team on the right side of the spread. The inside man was senior Rick Kuhn, who brought in team-mate Jim Sweeney. The money and the bookmaking network came through Henry Hill, a Lucchese associate, and James "Jimmy" Burke, with Lucchese capo Paul Vario giving his approval.

The games

It was a shambles from the off. The test run against Providence on 6 December 1978 failed, with BC winning by 19 against a line of six or seven points. On 16 December, favoured by 12 or 13 against Harvard, BC won only 86-83. On 23 December they lost 103-81 to UCLA, with the syndicate backing UCLA to cover.

Then came Holy Cross on 10 February 1979, with a 7-point line. Boston College rallied late, top scorer Ernie Cobb scoring eight points in the final minute, and lost by only two. The syndicate took a hammering. Hill said Burke lost about $50,000 and put his foot through the television.

Unravelled by Hill

In the end it was Hill who brought the whole thing down. Arrested on drug-trafficking charges in 1980 and linked to the Lufthansa heist, he turned state's evidence. The federal trial in 1981 rested mostly on Hill, along with Sweeney, Joseph Beaulieu and Barbara Reed, Kuhn's partner.

After a four-week trial, Burke, Kuhn, their co-defendant Mazzei, Tony Perla and Rocco Perla were each convicted of conspiracy, conspiracy to commit sports bribery and interstate travel with intent to commit bribery. Burke got 12 years. Kuhn got 10, later cut to 28 months. Mazzei and Tony Perla got 10 years each, and Rocco Perla four. Sweeney testified and was never charged.

Ernie Cobb was acquitted. Kuhn had left an envelope with $1,000 for Cobb's girlfriend, but it was never proven that Cobb agreed to anything.

Kuhn died on 22 December 2024, aged 69. The story lives on in ESPN's 30 for 30 film "Playing for the Mob" (2014), narrated by Ray Liotta, who played Hill in Goodfellas. Few fixing stories come with a better cast.

"...betrayed the most sacred trust in professional sports."
— NBA commissioner David Stern on Tim Donaghy

Stern didn't mince his words, and he had good reason. This case struck at the one person on court who is supposed to have no interest in the result. Tim Donaghy refereed in the NBA from 1994 to 2007, working 772 regular-season games and 26 playoff games. He resigned on 9 July 2007, and on 20 July 2007 the New York Post reported an FBI investigation.

Donaghy admitted betting on games he officiated across four seasons, from 2003-04 to 2006-07. He pleaded guilty to two federal charges on 15 August 2007, claimed a gambling problem at sentencing, and on 29 July 2008 was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison. He served 11 months in a prison camp in Pensacola, Florida, and the rest in a halfway house. He was sent back to prison in August 2009 for violating his release terms, and freed on 4 November 2009.

Two things stand out. The league didn't catch him: the FBI stumbled on Donaghy during a broader organised-crime investigation. And while the early reports talked up mob links, crime reporters soon discounted that angle. The real lesson was simpler and more uncomfortable. A single official is a target worth approaching.

How the scheme worked

Porter's case is the clearest example yet of fixing in the age of legal sports betting. In 2024, heavily in debt to gamblers, he agreed to leave games early, feigning injury or illness, so that bets on him under-performing his player props would win. Two games were named. Against the LA Clippers on 26 January 2024 he went off with an eye injury; against Sacramento on 20 March 2024 he cited illness.

He was also betting on NBA games himself, through another person's account. The NBA's findings put it at 13 bets between January and March 2024, with $54,000 staked and more than $22,000 won. Keep those two things apart. Betting on games is a rule breach, not fixing. Leaving games early to make bets land is fixing.

Caught by the betting market

This was a fix the bookmakers found. ESPN reported the league's investigation on 25 March 2024, and on 11 April 2024 Colorado's Division of Gaming told sportsbooks to report any wagers linked to Porter. On 17 April 2024 the NBA banned him for life, the first active player banned for gambling since Jack Molinas in 1954.

The criminal case followed. A federal felony charge was made public on 3 July 2024, and later that month Porter pleaded guilty to wire-fraud conspiracy. His sentencing was delayed again and again, and in February 2026 he was still awaiting sentence. Four men were charged in connection with the scheme. One of them, Long Phi Pham, was arrested at JFK Airport on 4 June 2024 and pleaded guilty in October 2024.

Everything in this section is an allegation unless we say otherwise.

October 2025: the NBA cases

On 23 October 2025, the US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York announced two indictments, with 34 people arrested or indicted across them.

The betting case charged Terry Rozier, then of the Miami Heat, former player Damon Jones and others over the alleged use of non-public NBA information to bet. Prosecutors allege that Rozier left a 2023 game for Charlotte after nine minutes with a foot injury while associates bet more than $200,000 on him under-performing. A superseding indictment on 28 May 2026 accused him of accepting a $100,000 bribe to alter his performance, adding charges of wire-fraud conspiracy and bribery in sporting contests. The NBA had investigated Rozier earlier and found no violation. He pleaded not guilty on 8 December 2025 and denies the allegations. Jones was accused of passing on confidential injury information before Lakers games in 2023 and 2024, and in April 2026 he became the first defendant in the sweep to plead guilty.

The second indictment, against 31 defendants, included Portland head coach Chauncey Billups. It concerns an alleged rigged-poker scheme that prosecutors link to the Mafia, with alleged losses of about $7 million. Billups is charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, denies the allegations and was placed on leave by the NBA. It is a card-cheating case, not an allegation of fixing basketball games. The two get lumped together in headlines, and they shouldn't be.

January 2026: college basketball again

"In basketball, one player could substantially influence a game in ways that in other sports you cannot."
— David Metcalf, US Attorney, announcing the charges on 15 January 2026

Seventy-five years after CCNY, a prosecutor was describing the very same weakness. On 15 January 2026, Metcalf's office in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania announced charges against 26 people. Prosecutors allege that 39 players on 17 NCAA Division I teams were involved, that 29 games were fixed or attempted between September 2022 and February 2025, and that bribes ran from $10,000 to $30,000 a game. The alleged scheme also reached Chinese Basketball Association games.

The alleged method is point shaving in its purest form: bribe a player on the team expected to lose so that it loses by more than the spread. According to prosecutors, some of the attempts failed.

Basketball's big cases have come to light in very different ways. The 1951 scandal was a district attorney's investigation. Boston College fell apart because a mob associate turned state's evidence. Donaghy was found by the FBI while it was looking at something else entirely.

Porter is the modern model. Sportsbooks spotted a stake that made no sense for a player of his standing and reported it to the league and the IBIA, and law enforcement and state regulators followed. Our guide to how betting integrity units catch fixers explains how that monitoring works across sport.

Punishment runs on two tracks:

• The sport: lifetime bans, from the 35 players of 1951 to Porter in April 2024.
• The courts: New York State prosecuted the 1951 cases as bribery, the Boston College case used federal conspiracy and sports-bribery laws, and the modern cases have been brought federally as wire fraud and sports bribery.

We think the two need each other. A ban protects the league quickly, but it's the criminal cases that reach the people paying for the fixes.

History tells you where to look. The 1951 and 2026 cases centre on the college game, and Porter showed that the modern weak spot is the prop market on a low-profile player, where a few minutes off court can decide a bet.

• Money that doesn't fit the player. Porter was flagged because the stake was out of all proportion to his role. Heavy, sudden money on a bench player's unders is the red flag bookmakers act on.
• Early exits and late injury news. The Porter case and the Rozier allegations both involve a player leaving a game early. A market that moves hard before any injury news is public deserves caution.
• Obscure games. Lower-profile college fixtures and smaller leagues get far less scrutiny than an NBA play-off game.

On settlement, Porter shows what can happen: DraftKings refused to pay out and froze the account. How your own bets would be treated depends on your bookmaker's house rules, so know them before you go anywhere near niche markets.

Our view is simple. Stick to licensed bookmakers, because licensed books are part of the reporting chain that caught Porter, and favour the main markets, where the sheer volume of money makes manipulation much harder to hide.

Basketball has been fighting the same problem since 1951, and the fixer's pitch has barely changed: you don't have to lose, just come up a little short. What has changed is the speed of detection. In 1951 the bribes had been running for years before anyone was arrested. In 2024, an $80,000 bet on a bench player had the league banning him within a month. That's real progress, and it should give punters confidence in a well-regulated market.

• Point shaving is the classic basketball fix. Winning by less than the spread is still a fix, as 35 players learned in 1951.
• Props are the new pressure point. One early exit by a fringe player was enough for the Porter scheme.
• The bookmakers are the alarm. DraftKings and FanDuel's reports set off the Porter investigation, and that's a strong argument for licensed books.
• Charged is not convicted. Rozier denies the allegations, Billups' case is about poker, and the 2026 college allegations are untested.
• Acquittals matter. Ernie Cobb was acquitted, and Nat Holman and Bobby Sand were cleared in 1951.
• Betting isn't fixing. A player staking on games breaks the rules; leaving a game early to make a bet land is something worse.

• Match fixing in sport: how it's done and every sport hit
• How betting integrity units catch fixers
• Baseball's fixing scandals: the Black Sox, Pete Rose and prop-bet probes
• Match fixing in football: the biggest scandals
• Match fixing in cricket: spot-fixing and the Lord's no-ball
• How to bet on basketball: NBA and EuroLeague point spreads

18+. Please gamble responsibly. For free, confidential support visit BeGambleAware.org. If a basketball market doesn't look right, tell your bookmaker or report it to Crimestoppers.