7 October 2026 - 8:00pm
LeBron James will make more money — a reported $15 million a year — as one of the new faces of Polymarket than he will as a starter for the Philadelphia 76ers, his new team. Polymarket is a prediction market, and bettors can bet on division winners or on the Super Bowl or on a game with roughly the same odds and outcomes as they would on gambling sites. A contract there is equivalent to a moneyline bet.
The NBA has long had a complicated relationship with gambling. The league’s most celebrated player of all time, Michael Jordan, obsessively gambled on cards and golf and made a notorious trip to Atlantic City in the middle of the 1993 playoffs. One conspiracy asserts that he did not in fact temporarily retire to play baseball that same year, but was instead secretly suspended by then-NBA Commissioner David Stern. Last year, multiple NBA players, as well as coach Chauncey Billups, were investigated by the FBI and charged in federal gambling cases. The league’s official partners include betting firms FanDuel and DraftKings.
In short, gambling is firmly a part of basketball culture. But James’s Polymarket sponsorship goes halfway towards breaking the NBA’s last gambling-related taboo: players actively endorsing betting on their own league. He can accept this sponsorship in part because the NBA’s 2023 collective bargaining agreement lets players endorse betting companies so long as they don’t promote betting on the league itself; LeBron has been a DraftKings ambassador since 2024, where his participation is limited to American football and non-NBA related events.
The rest is legal and technical. Polymarket is not technically a sportsbook, and buying a contract there is technically not betting. Where it differs from traditional sportsbooks is the range of events on which users can bet. The platform is frequently in the news, thanks to the upcoming midterms and the differences, sometimes wide, between its price signals and polls. But as James’s free agency demonstrates, off-court player behaviour can easily become as large a market as on-court performance.
In a very basic sense, then, advocacy for Polymarket tells basketball fans that they should take these parallel wagering opportunities seriously, while providing NBA insiders — who might have untraceable ways of knowing where players are going and what they’re doing — opportunities to manipulate price signals. Whether a player retires, moves, or says a certain word at the post-game press conference may become more important to people than what happens in games. Every low-level or even high-level NBA employee will have perverse incentives to use inside information to make money, whether they’re betting on games or outside of games. Meanwhile, the on-court product becomes increasingly irrelevant.
It is frankly hard to believe that the NBA would let LeBron do this, just as it was hard to believe it would let Miami Heat forward Giannis Antetokounmpo invest in Kalshi, Polymarket’s main rival, earlier this year. Qualitatively, at least, Jordan’s compulsive gambling seemed in line with his on-court behaviour, his nearly psychopathic competitiveness. Today’s players may also look at betting markets the same way they look at basketball — as an investment opportunity.
Fans are unlikely to benefit from being encouraged to gamble more, to have another way of placing bets on games or the events surrounding them. These kinds of markets are lucrative for insiders and sharps, and it is extraordinarily difficult to consistently make money on Polymarket or on a sportsbook. The average fan has nothing to gain from these kinds of endorsement deals, and everything to lose.
