Soon after the Players-Only NBA 2K Tournament was announced, sportsbooks set odds, lines and various prop bets for the event. This was the closest thing to live team sports action anyone had seen since the NBA went on hiatus and all other professional sports leagues and the NCAA followed suit.
When all the betting options came out, Brooklyn Nets forward Kevin Durant wasn’t the favorite to win, but he had the second-best odds to go the distance. So the result of his first-round game against Miami’s Derrick Jones Jr. — a 78-62 loss for the Brooklyn star — was shocking.
Well, for some it was surprising. Not all.
“It became clear that somebody knew something, and that the results had been leaked,” MyBookie.ag’s head oddsmaker David Strauss told Reuters.
For SportsBetting.ag, it became clear something was up when the Durant-Jones matchup bets came in, and those concerns were confirmed after the result, as odds manager Robert Cooper told the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
We initially made Durant the favorite to win the tournament but when … the bets were completely one-sided toward Jones, it became obvious that someone knew the outcome of the game.
SportsBetting.ag lost in the “low five figures” in the first round because of the leak. MyBookie.ag suspended betting on the event.