NBA Las Vegas gaming consultant is Art Manteris
Word is out now that Art Manteris, vice president of race and sports operations for Station Casinos, is the “local Las Vegas consultant” referred to in yesterday’s press conference held by NBA commissioner David Stern.
Apparently Manteris has been contacted by the FBI and is in-the-loop, so to speak, on the agency’s investigation into allegations that former NBA referee Tim Donaghy bet on basketball games, or provided information to others who bet, during the 2005-’06 season.
Much has been written and discussed about the NBA’s current crisis.
Overwhelmingly, people seem to take note of NBA commissioner Stern’s previous public statements denying and even refusing to discuss the possibility that the league would be confronted with a gambling scandal.
This situation has certainly sent the NBA into damage control mode, and rightly so.
Several Las Vegas commentators have pointed out that the regulated gaming environment in Nevada would actually be a good thing for the NBA, now more than ever.
Hopefully what sports leagues take away from this scenario is that no one is immune, and no one should claim to be immune (right, Stern?). It seems to me that every professional sports league ought to be implementing and publicizing its policies and procedures for ensuring security and honest-to-goodness, non-fixed games.
What Las Vegas does well is regulate gaming. We’re an international destination with a mystique and history of mob-control and modern regulations, regulators and state-of-the-art security that you can take to the bank. If someone’s cheating in Vegas, odds are not in their favor.
And that, to me, is how Las Vegas can play a key role in the Donaghy fiasco. NBA: how about taking some advice from the gambling pros?
The history of the NBA is peppered with gambling scandals and betting fiascoes. You rarely hear of golfers altering their golf clubs in order to throw a match! The only sport that seems to have such a occurrence of betting is baseball, where for a while pitchers were gluing sandpaper into their baseball glove.
