Gary Bettman has said a lot of things over the years that people disagreed with. That is, in many ways, the defining feature of his tenure as NHL commissioner. But there is one position he held, loudly and for years, that I think deserves more attention than it gets in hindsight.
He did not want sports betting near his game.
When the NHL became the first major North American professional sports league to put a franchise in Las Vegas in 2016, the obvious question was what that meant for gambling’s relationship with hockey. Bettman’s answer was careful and consistent. “We don’t worry about the integrity of our game,” he told reporters. “I’m more focused on the atmosphere in the arena. While we know gambling is part of the industry in Las Vegas, we’re not going to make it all that easy for you to pick up a gambling ticket on your way into the arena. We like the atmosphere in our buildings, and we believe we can maintain that atmosphere consistent with what the realities are here.”
He had been saying versions of this for years. “I think there needs to be some attention paid to what sport is going to represent to young people: should it be viewed in the competitive, team-oriented sense that it is now, or does it become a vehicle for betting, which may, in effect, change the atmosphere in the stadiums and the arenas?” And more specifically: “I think that when somebody loses a bet, they tend to sometimes confuse their motives in rooting and enjoying the game, because if you lose your bet, even though the team you’re rooting for wins, you have a potentially conflicted outcome. And so I do believe that there is a negative element or atmosphere from any betting.”
And then, like everyone else, he changed his tune.
How We Got Here
For most of American sports history, sports betting was effectively illegal outside of Nevada. The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, passed by Congress in 1992, prohibited states from authorizing sports gambling schemes, cementing Nevada’s monopoly and keeping the rest of the country, at least officially, on the sidelines.
The operative word is officially. Everyone knew the illegal market was enormous. Bettman himself acknowledged that “trillions of dollars” were being bet on sports illegally in the United States, and argued that the existence of that market without integrity problems was proof the legal version could be managed. Which is a reasonable point, as far as it goes.
What broke the dam was Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, decided by the Supreme Court in May 2018. The Court held that PASPA was an unconstitutional violation of states’ rights under the anti-commandeering doctrine of the Tenth Amendment, striking down a federal law that had stood for over twenty-five years. The decision did not legalize sports betting. It did something more consequential: it handed the question to the states. Within weeks of the decision, the first legal sports bets outside of Nevada were taken in Delaware and New Jersey. The rest followed quickly.
Today, sports betting is legal in the majority of US states. It is integrated into broadcasts, embedded in apps, advertised during every commercial break of every major sporting event, and generating revenue that leagues have found very difficult to turn down. The NHL, to nobody’s great surprise, eventually came around. By 2019, Bettman was appearing before casino executives and speaking of sports gambling as “another point of engagement for the fans.” The skeptic had become a convert, or at least a pragmatist.
I understand why. The money is real. A casual fan with twenty dollars on a game watches differently than one without skin in the game, and leagues have noticed.
But I keep thinking about what Bettman said before the money talked. And I think he was right.
The Case For, Briefly
I want to be fair here because I am not actually arguing that sports betting should be re-criminalized, or that the Murphy decision was wrong on the law, or that adults do not have the right to spend their money however they choose. They do. That is a real argument and it has real weight.
The case for legal sports betting is not nothing. Legalization brings the market into the open, where it can be regulated, taxed, and theoretically monitored for integrity violations. It generates state revenue. It gives fans a form of engagement that was happening anyway, just underground. And there is something genuinely paternalistic about the government telling adults they cannot place a bet on a hockey game if they want to.
I accept all of that. And I still do not think it has been good for sport.
What It Actually Does
The data comes from a few places worth naming. The Athletic conducted an anonymous survey of NHL players in late 2024, and a separate one of NFL players published in early 2026. The NCAA partnered with data science company Signify Group to analyze over 54,000 social media posts targeting athletes, coaches, and officials across major college championships. And Birches Health compiled an anonymous multi-league survey across MLB, NBA, NHL, and NFL players on their experiences since legalization. These are not anecdotes. These are documented, surveyed, analyzed patterns.
The Athletic’s survey of NHL players found that one third of athletes said fan harassment was on the rise in the wake of sports betting legalization. One anonymous player described the experience directly: “Like it’s getting crazy. You’re up 2-0 and lose, you get messages, like, ‘You’re a f—ing asshole, I’m gonna f—ing kill you.’”
In The Athletic’s NFL survey, nearly 71 percent of the 78 players polled said they had received direct communications from fans relating to a negative betting or fantasy football outcome. One player said: “People use slurs. People have said they’d kill me. I hadn’t seen the ball thrown my way, and I remember someone said they’d kill me.”
The Birches Health multi-league survey found that 78% of MLB players said legal sports betting has changed how fans treat them. Several reported death threats, including messages demanding repayment for lost bets. NHL players, especially goalies, reported receiving frequent disturbing messages, and it had become so regular that some said harassment was expected regardless of performance.
Read that last part again. Regardless of performance. Not just when they have a bad game. Just because they exist and people have money riding on outcomes they are involved in.
Ottawa Senators captain Brady Tkachuk had to remove his name and photo from Venmo after being bombarded with payment requests from bettors demanding money when he failed to hit prop bet targets like shots or hits.
On the college side, the NCAA and Signify Group’s analysis found that abuse from “angry sports bettors” made up at least 12% of all publicly posted social media abuse directed at college athletes, with women athletes receiving approximately 59% more abusive messages than men. The NCAA emphasized that the analysis covered only public-facing threats, not private messages, where harassment is likely worse.
Every athlete that steps onto the field or court now has the potential to make a play that loses someone money, because almost every part of the game has become subject to a betting line. Not just who wins. Not just the final score. Individual performances, individual plays, individual statistical outputs. A goalie lets in a soft goal and somewhere, someone who had money on his save percentage is in his DMs.
The mental health implications of this are not complicated. These are human beings who have dedicated their lives to their sport, who are already operating under enormous competitive and public pressure, who now also carry the knowledge that strangers with financial stakes in their performance have a direct line to them at all times. A 2025 U.S. News survey found that 21% of sports bettors admit to verbally abusing an athlete. That is not a fringe group. That is one in five people placing a bet.
This is the part of the “engagement” conversation that does not show up in the revenue projections.
The Problem for Hockey
The NHL has historically prided itself on the culture of its locker rooms, on the idea that players protect each other, that the team comes before everything. That culture is real and it is part of what makes hockey hockey. But it is also a culture that has always been slow to address mental health, slow to acknowledge when players are struggling, and quick to reward those who perform through pain and pressure without complaint.
Now layer sports betting on top of that. Players who are already culturally conditioned to minimize their struggles are now absorbing harassment from strangers with financial grievances, in their phones, in their mentions, sometimes in their DMs with their families mentioned by name. And the expectation, in most cases, is that they handle it. That they are professional. That they do not let it affect their game.
The NHL sent a memo in 2022 warning that betting on league games, even legally, is strictly prohibited for players and personnel. That is an internal rule. It says nothing about what players are allowed to receive from the outside. The protection, such as it is, flows in one direction.
The most glaring example of this contradiction sits right in the middle of the league’s own recent history. In 2023, Ottawa Senators center Shane Pinto was suspended for 41 games, one of the longest suspensions in league history, for violating the NHL’s gambling rules. The league’s investigation found no evidence that Pinto bet on NHL games. What he actually did, as he later explained himself, was have his friends place legal bets on other sports on his behalf because as a non-Canadian citizen he could not access a Canadian sportsbook. Proxy betting. That was it. Half a season, gone.
“I had my buddies, because I was in Canada, just place bets for me in America,” Pinto said. “I wasn’t a Canadian citizen, so I couldn’t really use a Canadian sportsbook. So I just had my buddies place bets for me, and that’s proxy betting. So that’s obviously a big no-no.”
He accepted the suspension. He did not fight it. He came back, played well, and has since signed a four-year extension. Good for him. But the context around that suspension is worth sitting with, because the Ottawa Senators, Pinto’s own team, became the first NHL franchise to put a gambling advertisement on their helmets in 2021, through a deal with Bet99. Their helmets. The ones the players wear on the ice. The league that suspended a 22-year-old for half a season for having his friends place legal bets on football games was simultaneously putting sportsbook logos on the heads of its players and signing partnership deals with gambling companies across the board.
I am not saying Pinto was blameless. The rules are the rules and he broke them, even if the specifics of how he broke them say more about the jurisdictional complexity of gambling law than about any malicious intent. But the image of a young player sitting out 41 games for being adjacent to the very industry his employer was actively marketing on their helmets is one of the more uncomfortable illustrations of where the league’s priorities actually lie. The gambling money is welcome. The gambling, for the players, is not. And that line is being drawn by the same people cashing the checks.
What Bettman Got Right and Then Forgot
The irony of Bettman’s evolution on this issue is that his early position was the more intellectually honest one. He was right that betting changes the atmosphere. He was right that losing a bet creates a conflicted relationship with the game. He was right that there is something worth protecting in the experience of sport that cannot simply be monetized without consequence.
What he perhaps did not fully account for was the specific way that social media would weaponize the betting market against the athletes themselves. The harassment problem is not just a stadium atmosphere problem. It is a direct access problem. Bettors do not just feel bad about their losses in their seats. They go looking for someone to blame, and the people who are easiest to find, easiest to reach, are the ones whose names are on the jerseys.
I am not naive about where this goes. Sports betting is legal, it is entrenched, it is generating too much money for anyone with power to seriously consider pulling back. The leagues have taken their partnerships. The states have taken their tax revenue. The apps are on everyone’s phones.
But I think about what Bettman said in 2016, before the conversion, before the partnerships, before the revenue. I think about the question he asked about what sport should represent to young people. Whether it should be about competition and teams and the game itself, or whether it should become a vehicle for something else.
I think that question deserved a longer hearing than it got.
And as someone whose entire professional interest is in how hockey treats the people who play it, whose research lives in the space between what the sport demands and what it costs, I find myself sitting with the uncomfortable conclusion that the house winning has meant that the players, in some new and underappreciated way, keep losing.
This is just my read, and I hold it with the appropriate level of humility. But I wanted to say it plainly, because I do not think it gets said plainly very often in a conversation that is mostly about revenue and engagement and market expansion.
The athletes are people. The game is not just a product. And some things, once you let them in, are very hard to walk back.
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