Jontay Porter had what millions of young basketball players dream of: a chance to play in the NBA and make serious money. Instead, the younger brother of Denver Nuggets star Michael Porter Jr. was risking hundreds of thousands of dollars on sports bets while trying to keep his NBA dream alive.
Inside His Gambling Addiction
His gambling didn’t begin with the scandal that ultimately ended his NBA career. By then, Porter had already lost a small fortune, won it back and developed an appetite for increasingly risky bets.
New details reported by The New Yorker show how far Porter went to chase money, even as his losses mounted.
Porter began gambling in 2021, after being cut by the Memphis Grizzlies and while living in Memphis. He placed a $125,000 bet on the Kansas City Chiefs to beat the Baltimore Ravens, then added a $10,000 parlay involving the same game.
He lost $135,000.
That weekend, Porter made another 143 sports bets totaling more than $1 million. For a player still fighting for a secure NBA job, those were enormous sums to put at risk.
Then came the house money.
Porter had borrowed $500,000 against his home and then gambled it all away. He did not want his then-girlfriend, Kelli, who would later become his wife, to know what had happened. So he decided to try to win the money back during a six-hour drive from Memphis to his parents’ home in Missouri.
“I’m instantly, like, I gotta make that five hundred thousand back real quick,” he recalled.
Porter reportedly put his Tesla on autopilot and played blackjack on his phone, hoping to recover the $500,000 before he arrived.
Instead, he lost another $200,000.
A month later, while staying with his brother in Denver, Porter found another way to gamble. He started placing six-figure bets on Russian table tennis matches through FanDuel. Some matches lasted only 15 minutes.
For three straight days, he kept betting. This time, he made more than $1 million in profits, enough to cover his earlier losses.
But the big win did not make him stop.
“It’s exhilarating because, in your mind, your whole life rides on how good a serve this Ping-Pong guy has,” Porter said.
By 2022, Porter’s gambling was creating problems at home. He was no longer just risking his own money; he was also hiding how much he was spending.
After his wife cut off his access to their joint accounts, Porter began using her phone to Venmo money to himself, hoping to win it back and replace it before she woke up.
He also used her credit cards to gamble, then insisted the charges were fraudulent when she noticed them.
Even his mother became a victim of his gambling.
One Thanksgiving Day, Porter stole thousands of dollars from her Apple Pay account to keep gambling.
His family eventually intervened. His brother, Michael, paid for a 30-day treatment program in Florida. Still, Porter later became part of a scheme involving bets on his own NBA performances.
While playing for the Toronto Raptors, Porter deliberately limited his participation in games so others could profit from wagers on his statistics. The NBA banned him for life in April 2024. He later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. His sentencing is scheduled for December 18.
He is not the only one carrying the betting monkey on his back.
Former Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier pleaded not guilty to federal charges stemming from allegations that he agreed to accept a proposed $100,000 payment to leave a game early. He also reportedly faces an order to forfeit nearly $26.6 million in NBA salary.
Another example is former Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, who also pleaded not guilty in connection with an alleged rigged poker scheme. The case cost him his $4.7 million-a-year coaching job.
Others simply watched their fortunes disappear. One particularly distressing case involved three-time NBA All-Star Antoine Walker, who filed for bankruptcy in 2010 despite earning approximately $108 million during his career. Gambling contributed to his financial troubles.
Gambling addiction has derailed careers and destroyed lives, and these players learned that lesson firsthand.
Porter once won more than $1 million in three days betting on table tennis. But after putting his money, his family’s trust and his NBA future at risk, he now faces a much bigger loss. No winning ticket can get him back into the league that banned him for life.
