Now that the Oakland Raiders officially have announced they’re moving to Las Vegas, it appears the NFL and the other major professional sports leagues are becoming more tolerant of sports betting. Heck, the NHL even gave its new Vegas franchise, the Golden Knights, permission to make sponsorship deals with casinos that have sports betting.
LegalSportsReport.com notes that, although NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has long been a proponent of legalized sports betting, others in the league’s office are beginning to agree with him. “There is definitely forward motion,” Dan Spillane, an NBA senior vice president who has led the league’s efforts to study the issue, recently told The Wall Street Journal. “Five years ago, no one saw this as something that could realistically happen.”
Rob Manfred, commissioner of Major League Baseball, recently said on ESPN Radio’s Mike & Mike show that Silver “has done a nice job of making people aware that the landscape on sports gambling is changing around us. … We’ve begun a conversation educating people about what’s out there, what sports leagues in other countries have done, in an effort to make sure Major League Baseball is ready to join in what I think is going to be a dialogue about how sports gambling regulation in the United States should be changed.”
“This is a stunning advancement from each of the professional sports leagues in a multitude of different settings,” Daniel Wallach, a gaming and sports law attorney with Becker & Poliakoff, told BleacherReport.com. “When viewed in its totality, the possibility of legal sports gambling is closer than we realize.”
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