Gambling scandals are everywhere. Which Knick is most likely to be next?

If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, get in line

When he was 19, Malik Beasley had surgery to repair a stress fracture in his right leg, keeping him out of the NBA’s pre-draft workouts. Beasley only played a year in college before declaring for the draft. That was a gamble. So was surgery. Missing those workouts, too. Everything he’d worked his whole life for, hanging on a knife’s edge.

When he was 19,  Rob Bresnahan was the chief financial officer of Kuharchik Construction, a highway electrical business in Pennsylvania. Kuharchik belonged to Rob’s grandfather, who had it primed and ready for a teenager to boss people two to three times his age. What’s the word for the opposite of “gamble”? Everything Bresnahan had waited his whole life for was ready and waiting for him on a platter.  

Beasley was drafted 19th in 2016, by Denver, the kind of move labeled a “smart bet” when a corporation gambles with with the banana-short shelf life of an aspiring pro athlete with zero agency. Today Beasley is at the center of a federal gambling probe; the $42 million the Pistons were set to give him this summer after the best year of his career went to Duncan Robinson and Caris LeVert. Detroit fans may be sad to lose such a popular and potent player, but the law is the law. Can’t have the players rigging the game. Public confidence in our sporting institutions being on the level is paramount.

Upon graduating, Bresnahan was gifted something most undergrad couldn’t even dream of: a promotion to CEO. Last year he was elected to Congress; this year he voted for the One Big Bullshit Bill and its ongoing sociopathic privitization of survival after initially pledging not to, a promise given before he then sold his shares in a Medicaid provider that not coincidentally tanked right after the vote. Wouldn’t think politicians rigging the market to enrich people already so enriched they sweat gout would be kosher, though Bresnahan wasn’t punished and likely never will be. The law is the law until the law’s the one breaking it. Public confidence in government officials being on the level? What, you use a sundial to check the time?

Gambling scandals are all over sports: MLB (players and umpires), NFL, soccer, even a boxer accused of stealing millions from multiple NBA players. While that flood of sewage crests to an unstoppable tsunami, there’s plenty of hope around next year’s New York Knicks. They appear to face limited obstacles to reaching the Finals next year, so let’s gird ourselves against the freaky possibilities, like the team we’ve waited a lifetime for being derailed by a betting scandal. Who’d be Madison Square Garden’s modern-day Pete Rose, only without the child rape or dickery?

The Knicks fall into one of three categories.  From least- to most-likely:     

The 1,000,000-to-1 shots

Miles McBride

Deuce is a good dude. Can’t you tell? Isn’t it just obvious? McBride was pro’ly the type of kid who saw another getting bullied and stepped in, maybe took a whupping for his troubles, but he stood up for someone, for something. When’s the last time you did? Not a criticism, doves. Just offering you a chance to check in honestly with yourself and what you are or could be doing to make your world a better one by embettering someone else’s.

Also, while he’s a small by NBA standards, Deuce comes in around the 90th percentile for height for the general population. He also played quarterback in high school, in all likelihood better than whoever played QB at your high school. McBride probably wasn’t losing many of those scraps with the bullies, further affirming his righteousness: he wasn’t just resisting the worst type of human, he was bringing them justice. Deuce isn’t the type to get embroiled in a gambling scandal. He’s the type who’d lead a friend away from that path. Miles McBride, you’re all right. 

Karl-Anthony Towns

Vince Carter isn’t a name you hear a lot when people discuss Towns. You should. Indulge me.

Both were elite prospects throughout high school, then leading men at blueblood basketball programs. Both are, improbably yet inarguably, the best in NBA history at two different, valuable, tangible skills. If “basketball athleticism” is shorthand for “speed plus power ramping up to unstoppability,” the greatest NBA athletes I’ve ever seen are Carter, Michael Jordan, Darvin Ham and LeBron James. Put Carter up against any of them and athletically and I give him the edge. Just one person’s opinion; yours is no less valid. Right around the 1:00 mark in the clip below young Vince makes Hakeem Olajuwon and Scottie Pippen, the most dominant paint and perimeter defenders of that era, look like Towns and Jalen Brunson defending. 

KAT likes to say he’s the greatest deep-shooting 7-footer ever. Curious, given that Kevin Durant is alive and quite kicking (not to mention a certain 7-foot German whose shooting was the foundation of a championship). It’s probably fair to say no player with a greater overall mass than Towns ever shot better, but that’s a lotta extra syllables and a society that doesn’t have time for due process has even less for the fine print. However you care to put it, New York is a franchise whose big men have been historically ahead of the curve draining from deeper than the average bear, whether Willis Reed, Patrick Ewing or Kristaps Porziņģis. KAT out-drains them all.        

Carter always seemed to see the big picture, sometimes to his detriment, like the day he attended his college graduation hours before playing a Game 7 in Philadelphia with a trip to the conference finals at stake. KAT was raised with so much it-takes-a-village love he practically oozes it. The big picture is never out of his sight, if not his reach.

You know how some people who get caught doing something wrong are only remorseful about getting caught? Not their actual offense? Towns would feel letting down his teammates, letting down the fans, the city. A betting scandal? Something that’d embarrass his family? Better chance KAT wins Defensive Player of the Year.     

Jordan Clarkson

Anyone who dresses like this has neither the time, money nor boredom to spend any getting in with the sharks.

Credit: basketballforever/Instagram

Guerchon Yabusele

Dreux is a small town in northern France, its population a steady 30,000 or so for 50 years. 40 years ago, its race for city council became one of the far-right Front National’s earliest electoral victories. Yabusele, the son of parents who left the Democratic Republic of Congo, grew up there after the town evolved to include more Muslims and immigrants. Before he ever played basketball, Yabusele trained as a boxer. I have zero proof, but I’m guessing a young Congolese immigrant growing up in a hotbed of haters and who trained with his fists (and who, unlike McBride, is big for a basketballer and a civilian) doesn’t suffer fools lightly. A Brian McNamee or Ippei Mizuhara buried somewhere deep in his closet? S'il te plaît!

More than once over the centuries, the French people put not only put the fear of God into their politicians but more cogently the guillotine. I don’t know if they’re smarter than us, tougher or both. But it’s one of the three. I don’t think Yabusele comes out of all that he did, having earned all that he has, to risk it all for just a little more of the one thing he doesn’t need more of. 

Even money

OG Anunoby

If the Knicks were all 12-years-old hiking through the woods and they stumbled on a dead body, OG would be one of the first voices saying they should go find an adult. I get the sense from his play that Anunoby is the kind of person who has the big picture in mind most of the time. Myopia need not apply to anyone as offensively patient and defensively all-purpose as he. Every person is born with the capacity for hard-won greatness. OG didn’t piss his away.

But OG also strikes me like Simon from Lord of the Flies, a sweet soul too sensitive for a species as suicidal and sadistic as ours. I could see his lone voice of reason being drowned out by voices that are a little too bored, a little too comfortable. The worst of the worst: the quietly cruel. I could see him going along with what the others end up doing because he doesn’t wanna rock the boat. I could see him breaking down under police questioning before it even gets to the third degree, and end up taking the fall when everyone else turns on him to save their hides. Anunoby probably doesn’t harbor criminal boss aspirations, but with the right push he’s perfect henchman material. Or, if you’re his criminal boss, the perfect patsy.

Mikal Bridges

A lot of you just thought the same thing: “The guy so afraid of contact he took two free throws all last season is a wild risk-taker off it? Ha.” Thing is, Bridges seems a creature of habit. You don’t play every single game from high school through college through seven years in the pros without at some point in life placing your faith in routine and probability.

Years ago I became friends with a dude who never smoked weed until we met in his mid-20s. He quickly fell in, too far and too fast. He was a volcano of passion, the type of person who’s introduced to a new concept Monday and by Friday they’ve read everything there is to know about it. He was a vampire, sleeping maybe four hours a night because there was always something he could be doing. So when he got into weed, he got in where he couldn’t get out.

That’s the kind of bettor Bridges would be. It’s hard to imagine him going too far down that road. But he’s also the type where the surest way to keep him off it is to never set foot on it. If you’re ever at an airport and see him betting on incoming flights and departures, call Leon Rose STAT.

The betting faves

The kids (Tyler Kolek, Pacôme Dadiet, Ariel Hukporti, Kevin McCullar)

Kolek and McCullar are 24, Hukporti 23 and Dadiet 20 later this month. Next year none make so much as $3 million. Those pairs of numbers are the biggest reasons why they’re (relatively) vulnerable to falling into a gambling scandal. They’ve been dreaming of NBA money much of their lives; now they’re sooo close yet still not quite there. They spend most of their time with teammates who earn (and have earned) way, way more. Their new head coach makes more than the four of them combined. If one of them sees the writing on the wall and realizes pretty they’re likely out of the Association sooner than later, could they be tempted to pursue some potentially shady secondary income? 

Nothing about any of this foursome’s personalities points to a likely betting problem. However, anyone born near the turn of the century – once humanity’s expiration date became less a matter of if than when – deserves their hard-won cynicism. Gambling your future away isn’t as nearly as big a deal when there’s no future to begin with.

Josh Hart

I have ADHD. Unlike many people who get a dopamine boost when they complete a task, creating a loop of positive reinforcement, people like me who lack that luxury often approximate that sensation via adrenaline: waiting till the last minute to start anything because anxiety, like dopamine, offers a rush. It’s exhausting, and it’s not a trait that ages well. But certain wires are wired the way they are, and that’s all there is to it. 

I don’t have any idea if Josh Hart lives the way he plays. Most of us differ when we’re on the clock versus off, but we also bring a lot of our authentic selves into our work lives. I suspect Hart plays the way he does because that’s the only way he knows how to operate. Betting on himself against all odds and then doubling down are the sky and sea of his world. More than most, he couldn’t be himself if he weren’t so fully himself.

Apply that to gambling and you’ve tossed a lit match into a dry forest. Betting on yourself against the odds and all reason, “doubling down” as some kind of macho “when the going gets tough” saddle-upping: these are the tools used by the well-intentioned when paving the roads to hell. The tendencies that make Hart an NBA Batman – a superhero with no superpowers who punches way above his weight – cast a darker shadow prismed through, say, a 54-year-old who lost their job last month but hasn’t told their spouse and three kids because they’re betting the family savings on a parlay that’ll cover the mortgage for three months, enough time to find a new job without anyone ever needing to know. They just need that one big break to go their way for once. It doesn’t.

Mitchell Robinson

I once loved a six-year-old who was terribly ill (Norwalk virus – nasty bugger). We were on the couch, their head resting on my arm, when with no retching or warning they suddenly vomited all over my bare arm. If you’d told me 24 hours earlier that was gonna happen — someone else’s bodily fluids projectiled all over me? The not-fun kind of fluids? I would have dug a hole in the ground, crawled in and died.

And yet when it happened, I felt nothing but love and warmth toward this poor suffering mammal. I couldn’t have known that would happen until it happened. Some truths cannot be foretold. I couldn’t have known how much capital Mitch has accumulated with me over his career until I wrote this.

If he isn’t traded by opening night next season, Robinson will be the first Knick to enter the league post-2000 and play eight seasons in New York. The first. Carmelo Anthony played seven. (You’ll never guess who’s next with six. I’ll tell you at the end.) How many players around the league can say the same? How many non-All Stars, especially? There’ve been ups and downs, but consider the magnitude of the ups: in six career playoff series, Mitch was the difference-maker in two (Cleveland in 2023; Boston in May), a handful in a losing effort (Indiana last season) and a plus-minus all six games of the Philadelphia series after nearly being Gilooly’d by Joel Embiid.

Mitch is the best offensive rebounder in the league. Stop! Don’t just gloss over that. Let it steep. Breathe it in. How often has any Knick you’ve known been the undisputed “best” in the league at anything? Allan Houston was an incredible shooter, but never the best. If Carmelo seemed built in a lab to get buckets, Durant was crafted by God to do the same, only better. Watching Knick playoff games takes literal years off my life, but watching Robinson single-handedly out-offensive rebound entire teams, I can’t help but laugh. Mitch means joy. To paraphrase KD: We know who Mitch is.

Mitch is a marrow-eater, here for what life there is to live and don’t you dare skimp on the feels-good. Death at sea seems a rough way to go, but if the captain of that boat is Mitchell Robinson you go down with that ship. 

I hope we never have to re-visit this subject, but if we ever do, you know where I stand on the matter. How about you? Which Knicks do you have complete faith in off the court? Do any cause you to wonder, or worry at all? Comment away, comrades.        

(The answer from earlier has a bit of a caveat – I don’t know what a full-sized caveat looks like; they’re always “a bit.” Anyway, Jared Jeffries spent six seasons as a Knick, but only four of those were full seasons; the other two saw him traded by or to New York midseason. Mitch and Melo played eight and seven full seasons here, so if you’re wondering which Knick who arrived after 2000 has the next-most full seasons at the Garden, the answer – with five – is Mr. Carolyn Wozniaki.)