The new metrics of cardinal sin

Adam Silver establishes the NBA's utmost transgression: to impede on the league's booming sports betting business.

Cardinal sin was slippery well before Adam Silver reached for it.

In Lutheranism, sin splits in two: venial and mortal. In Eastern Orthodoxy, a sin is a sin is a sin. In Catholicism, as I’m sure you’re aware, there are levels to it. Any sin can be ramped up with intent, downplayed by circumstance, forgiven through confession. There’s mortal sin — not the same but sort of — on a scale of missing mass to murder. Thomas Aquinas called them “capital sins” instead, because as the head of sins they form all the rest.

The cyclical nature of sin — commit, repent, repeat — has always suggested to me a notion of, if not safety, a get out of hell free card, then the assurance of a spiritual Groundhog Day.

Not so in the NBA.

While there have been plenty of loopholes granted to NBA athletes who have physically harmed other people, Silver explicitly said at his press conference following the Board of Governors meeting earlier this week in New York that what Jontay Porter has been accused of — placing prop bets on himself — is a cardinal sin. Porter is out until Silver and the league complete their investigation, most speculation I’ve seen suggests a lifetime ban as not the upper limit, but the baseline for punishment. I think I even came across the word “banished” in relation to Porter at some point this week.

It’s cardinal sin, what he’s accused of in the NBA.

It was news to me, at first, that anything could get this qualifier in the league. Cardinal sin suggests, to borrow from Aquinas, the thing that everything else will trickle down from. This was the NBA’s, and we were only hearing about it now?

(Silver briefly mentioned Tim Donaghy’s 2007 game fixing scandal toward the end of his 30 minute presser as an “incident with an official” — that was David Stern’s NBA, maybe sins of the father don’t count)

Slothful of me, how my brain caught up. This is about money. Money is the thing everything else trickles down from.

Money is why when Silver was asked for the first time about Porter, and whether Silver had any concerns about the growing relationship between the league and the pervasive enterprise of sports betting, he demurred on Porter and forged ahead to explain the NBA’s hallowed approach to betting.

The league went to the United States Supreme Court, he reminded the room, to press their position that sports betting should be a regulated industry. Clean money, is what that reference is meant to signal. Money talked about in respectable and quiet tones, further muffled by heavy red velvet drapes, in front of people dressed in robes seated up on a dais. Good money. Silver described the current landscape as a veritable mess of state-by-state laws, and not something the NBA ever wanted but now has to “deal with”. Though, he’s quick to add, he’s not against, because of the alternative: illegal sports betting (or, the other alternative: no sports betting).

Beyond making the official announcements for its increasing betting partnerships, Silver hasn’t spoken about the league’s relationship to gambling in a way that reveals (or betrays) much beyond the business of it. Watching NBA games this season, covering them in person, brought on a weird sense of displacement — how prevalent the betting side’s become makes it feel like it’s always been this way, otherwise how could this all have sprung up in one season? To some degree, Silver and the league have been counting on this quiet, unrelenting normalization and Porter disrupted it — for the first time and they hope, in the way the NBA moved to immediate severity, the last.

Silver’s relative silence and Porter’s disruption is what made it so interesting to listen and watch him move so quickly to demarcate the kind of sports betting he and the league are involved in as refined, secure, even noble. He painted betting on basketball before the NBA got involved as nefarious, a dark age we’d be loathe to return to. He talked about transparency now vs. when they had no “sophisticated computers” to detect “aberrational behaviour”, where betting took “place in the shadows, or underground”.

The NBA as the entity, like the archangel Michael, that synchronously banishes (Porter) and drags betting from darkness to light, sin to repentance.

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The seven deadly sins started out as nine evil thoughts, jotted down by a 4th century monk. Categorized as physical (“nutritive”, literally hunger pangs; sexual, and acquisitive appetites), emotional (depressive, irritable, or dismissive moods) and mental (thoughts produced by jealousy and envy, a boastful state of mind), they cast a wide net.

Evagrius Ponticus reduced these nine thoughts into a list of eight nouns (Ponticus, worth noting, was a recluse who didn’t eat cooked food, fruit, vegetables, or meat, his diet ruined his digestive tract, he didn’t bathe and hardly slept), and a Christian monk of the early Roman empire, John Cassian, translated them into “eight vices”. Pope Gregory I revised the list further, dropping sadness, rolling “vainglory” into pride, and adding envy. We had our seven.

The seven deadly sins aren’t in the bible, they’ve just seeped so deeply through culture that we think of them as guiding principals rooted in religion. In her book, On Our Best Behaviour: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good, Elise Loehnen traces the patriarchal origins of the big seven, examining how each has shaped and dominated culture and in turn, our lives.

“The church worked hard to mainstream them as a guideline for confession,” Loehnen writes, “The sins became a punch card of trespasses requiring penance: Anyone who indulged in them needed to atone.”

There is merit and comfort in faith and spirituality, but confession — an act devised through initially arbitrarily naming human impulses — is about control. To control not only one’s action, but thought, and to understand this is a losing game. The rules for repentance may shift, but the need for it never does. To be the one determining sin is to be the one with power.

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Money may be why Silver framed the slew of stories from this season about athletes and coaches being harassed by fans who’ve lost bets as “not anything new”. To control what counts as extreme is the cardinal rule of cardinal sin and there’s no need for league atonement, in this case attention to the increasingly aggressive and overstepping fans who bet on basketball and take it out on the people involved in the games, if we’re in a world where nothing so bad is happening or where any of this hasn’t happened before. In that world, if these increasing (“anecdotally it’s increasing,” Silver clarifies) altercations don’t count as disruptions to personal safety or professional environment — that is, a place where athletes aren’t going to get screamed at from the stands by fans who just lost a bet — then there’s no disruption to the money being made.

Like sin for a priest, money shape-shifts for Silver. It’s bottom line and what’s at the top. When it needs to take blame, it becomes “marketing”, with Silver wondering aloud what limits can be placed on the relentless and ubiquitous advertising of sports betting, and who should take responsibility (the government, gaming companies, all of us “as an industry”). The NBA has limited advertising of sports betting in its games directly, Silver stresses, but has no control over the marketing that bookends the games. These are ad reads in local broadcasts, TV commercials, banner and pre-roll ads on streaming sites, podcasters reading ads before and during shows, people you follow on social media paid by betting companies to make picks and present them as content, billboards and bus and subway ads, ads tented on top of taxis, like the kind I imagine Silver picturing when he says, empathetically, that he lives in the New York market and the promotion for gambling is constant.

Concepts of cardinal sin offer a kind of structural realism, a reality reinforced by adherence, belief and overall, prevalence. If sin is lurking everywhere, escaping it is never possible. The constant reinforcement of sports betting around basketball, in every imaginable sensory and referential nook and cranny, is accelerating gambling not only as augmented reality — like the real-time betting lines being added to NBA’s mobile League Pass app — but our actual, day-to-day version.

The NBA didn’t reinvent the wheel here, it’s only taking advantage of a structure established by greed — in the actionable, addictive sense, not necessarily the sinful one. In her seminal book, All About Love, bell hooks writes that greed “is unending; the desire is ongoing and can never be fully satisfied.” hooks was writing about greed in relation to addiction, and the search for satisfaction in the absence of love. In the context of the league’s entry and progression into sports betting, it reads like a business plan.

Why would the NBA, thriving in the constancy it’s created, want to rein it in? Moreover, at this point, how could they?

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Nicodemus the Hagiorite, an orthodox monk and named saint, recorded sin in classes according to severity for his instructional 18th century text, The Exomologetarion of Saint Nicodemus the Hagiorite: A manual of confession. The quality of sin distinguishable as a sunset’s gradient, one occasionally bleeding into the next:

1. Pardonable

2. Near the pardonable

3. Non-mortal

4. Near the non-mortal

5. Between the mortal and the non-mortal

6. Near the mortal

7. Mortal

Using anger as an example: The initial feeling of anger, that tight wash of heat come over the body, was pardonable so long as it was let to pass. To let the temper take root, to sputter something in anger, was stage two. Non-mortal would be verbal, to utter an expletive. Near the non-mortal would be striking someone with your hand. Next, a step that seems blurriest of all because the stage itself — between the mortal and the non-mortal — is in the midst of two actions, but that Nicodemus neatly defines as to “strike with a small stick”. Near the mortal is to move to a larger stick, or even a knife, but not strike at a person’s head. Mortal seems a jump from all of this, but also self-explanatory — to murder.

He wasn’t done, there were conditions:

1. Who is the doer of the sin

2. What sin was committed

3. Why was it committed

4. In what manner was it committed

5. At what time/age was it committed

6. Where was it committed

7. How many times was it committed

In clarification, or what was meant to “streamline” sin, it instead exploded outward. All this extra devotional paperwork to determine the severity of one waylaid impulse or regrettable action. The second section, the conditions, reads to me like an early police report. Which is probably not a coincidence.

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Cardinal Sin, full name Jaime Lachica Sin, was the 30th Catholic archbishop of Manila, and the third cardinal from the Philippines. He played a big role in leading protestors in the Philippines’ People Power Revolution, which led to the toppling of the country’s 20-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and inspired similar campaigns of peaceful resistance, like in East Germany and bringing down the Berlin Wall. He also called the promotion of condom use in the Philippines at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis “intrinsically evil”, denouncing the country’s health secretary as an agent of satan and burning boxes of condoms in the street.

A good reminder, the dualities of Cardinal Sin.

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Money is the reason Porter will be punished, and maybe to the farthest extent of the “enormous range of discipline” Silver said he has available to him (also news to me).

The money Porter perhaps gained in placing bets on himself paling against the hypothetical money on the line if the NBA is seen as compromised to its broadcast partners, legacy sponsors, to the same betting companies where Porter can go to place those bets, the betting companies the NBA has myriad budding partnerships with. That money is sacrosanct, Porter’s isn’t.

Porter is also expendable based on the money he makes playing basketball — a tiered system of valuation we intrinsically understand, but rarely talk about. Athletes who can cleanly be made examples of, whose contracts are not so big, will not pack any kind of levelling punch to their respective franchises, often are.

It’s hard to picture Silver standing there, on a temporary stage set up in a hotel ballroom in Midtown Manhattan with the shadowed heads of suited men in the front row hovering spectrally at the bottom of the frame, and saying the same thing about LeBron James, Luka Doncic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, or Steph Curry. Athletes the NBA is powered by, who its money moves for and through so calmly, cleanly, because there’s so much of it. The kind of money that relinquishes in its surging volume any new metrics of cardinal sin, certainly in the NBA and probably anywhere else. We spend 25-50% of our waking hours daydreaming, anyway.