Feb 5, 2025; New Orleans, LA, USA; The ESPN logo at the Super Bowl LIX media center at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

The NBA's latest betting scandal rocked the sports world on Thursday morning.

Among others, Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and active Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier were arrested by the FBI for their role in a sports betting ring reportedly connected to the Mafia. It's a strong indication that the NBA's betting internal problem, especially among active coaches and players, is probably much worse than we thought. All around, it sure seems like legalized, proliferated sports betting just might be something the league at large cannot be trusted to handle at this point.

After the initial wave of charges and indictments was announced, ESPN, one of the NBA's biggest broadcast partners, seemed to realize how tasteless it would be to promote wide sports betting amid a massive scandal for the aforementioned second-biggest American professional sports league.

We saw this during Get Up (which notably only earnestly dove into the sensitive topic after a few hours), when the network took down its ESPN Bet promo from the live tracker at the bottom of the screen. If ESPN leadership was hoping no one would notice the promo quite literally disappearing mid-broadcast while watching the show (or that no one would record it and aggregate it for the internet), well, that's a little naive, isn't it?

Someone tell the good folks at ESPN that once something like that makes it to air, it's going to be near impossible to simply scrub after the fact. People pay attention! Their eyes wouldn't lie to them! If the network wanted to avoid looking uncouth amid a massive criminal scandal, it would've updated its regular broadcast screen before going live.

Alas, it's too late. Everything on the internet is forever. Better luck next time.

This article originally appeared on For The Win: ESPN unsubtly removed its betting promo mid-broadcast amid NBA scandal

Reporting by Robert Zeglinski, For The Win / For The Win

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