Raptors forward Jontay Porter is in some hot water with the NBA after questions arose from his early exits from two game appearances on Jan. 26 and March 20.
Perhaps this problem was foreshadowed, though, in a stretch beginning in 2020, when Porter created an X account to promote his financial management maneuvers and more, including promoting a winning parlay during the 2022 NCAA Tournament.
“EZ parley (sic),” Porter posted.
The main purpose of the account, which he confirmed as belonging to him in a 2022 post, is to push his budding day trading career.
Porter said that he was a financial investment mogul, claiming to outperform hedge funds and having “turned $5k into $100k” while boasting he had done this a few times.
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“Robinhood is my have fun account where I try to grow it as quickly as possible,” Porter said as a guest in the Bound to be Rich Podcast in 2023.
In a June 2022 tweet, Porter called out a “lotto of the day” calling for his followers to buy calls on Gamestop.
DraftKings reported massive losses (wins for the bettors) on Porter in the player prop market, where the majority of bettors targeted his unders, with ESPN reporting that multiple betting accounts attempted to bet upward of $10,000 and $20,000 on his props.
He left the Jan. 26 and March 20 games early with illness and an eye injury, respectively.
One X account posted this screenshot of a betting ticket worth $80,000 that won $1.12 million, betting all of his unders at 13/1, although DraftKings did not confirm the validity of the said bet.
Prior to this season, Porter had been out of the league since 2021, seemingly having spent the last two seasons working his way back into the NBA, recovering from injuries while also making money in his cryptocurrency investment accounts.
Also of interest as the NBA begins to investigate the periphery rotation player is whether he purposely left games to manipulate his stats and make bettors money on his prop unders.
Porter is far from a household name and has been a fringe player in the league since going undrafted out of Missouri in the 2019 NBA Draft.
Jantay Porter during a March 2024 game. John E. Sokolowski-USA TODAY Sports He has played in just 37 career games since then, beginning in 2020 with the Grizzlies and continuing this season with the Raptors.
The fact that Porter is even eligible for props is worth looking at, considering he plays just 13.8 minutes per game for one of the worst teams in basketball over the second half of the season.
You may remember in 2022 the Warriors announced that Draymond Green will not play more than one minute in a game that featured Klay Thompson’s return to the lineup.
Sportsbooks, including DraftKings, were late to this news, while bettors same-game parlayed his unders for massive amounts of money.
When Green checked in, he was officially active, and all of his props counted on the record.
The results were a disaster for the sportsbook, which lost millions and even attempted to avoid paying those bets.
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What could have happened with Porter sounds similar.
This will surely lead to questions, potentially from the NBA, about whether props should be offered to players getting such little playing time and floating in and out of the league.
That money likely falls in comparison to the $415,000 he is contracted to make as a player this season.
