NBA bans opening-tip bets and single-player under parlays before the 2026-27 season

The NBA has told its partner sportsbooks to stop taking several kinds of wagers this season, including bets on who wins the opening tip and parlays built on one player’s under lines, in a memo sent on Friday, October 16, four days before the 2026-27 season tips off.

The move matters because the banned markets are the ones a single player can decide on his own. Both of the federal gambling cases that have shadowed the league in recent years turned on exactly that kind of bet, and the league wants those markets gone before opening night on Tuesday, October 20.

What is off the board

According to the memo, which ESPN obtained and The Associated Press also reported, licensed partners can no longer offer:

• wagers on which team wins the opening tip;
• props on a player missing a specific shot;
• under bets on players projected to play fewer than 12 minutes in a game;
• alternate under lines that pay out at inflated odds.

Bettors also lose the ability to combine unders on one player’s statistics inside a parlay. The memo describes these as low-likelihood, high-payout bets. The league had already pulled under bets on two-way players after the Jontay Porter case.

Scott Kaufman-Ross, the NBA executive vice president who oversees betting, framed the list as a trade-off: remove the riskiest bet types without pushing customers toward illegal books. FanDuel and DraftKings both said they support the changes, and DraftKings noted that some of the limits already match its own practice.

Why these bets, and why now

The restrictions follow the cases involving Porter and Terry Rozier. Porter admitted in court that he left games early to help bettors; one parlay on his unders in a March 2024 game was an $80,000 stake that stood to return about $1.1 million, and he played three minutes that night. Rozier’s case centers on under-based parlays tied to a March 2023 game in which he played about nine minutes. Rozier has pleaded not guilty and denies wrongdoing.

The league’s contracts allow it to dictate what its approved books offer, and the NBA estimates those partners handle more than 99 percent of legal betting in the United States. Prediction markets are the gap: the league has no formal partner there and acknowledged that enforcing the same limits on them will be harder.

More than a betting menu

A separate memo to the 30 teams lays out the rest of the integrity package for the season. Charles Tillman, the former NFL cornerback who later worked as an FBI agent, will run in-person training on the league’s gambling rules. The NBA is also upgrading its in-house, AI-driven monitoring platform, which combines game data, injury reports and betting records to flag unusual activity for investigators.

Players get new protection as well. The league has partnered with Social Protect, a service that finds and removes abusive social media messages, opened a text-message hotline for reporting threats, and rewritten its fan code of conduct to cover harassment by bettors.

What comes next

The rules are in force from opening night, when the season begins Tuesday, October 20. Fans can follow every game of the first week in the schedule and the league’s full calendar on the key dates page.