If you’ve had internet access in the past 24 hours, you know that Jontay Porter is away from the Toronto Raptors while the NBA investigates his ties to gambling on his own statlines.
The story of what’s unfolded this month is mad interesting, but we dug into what else he’s been up to off-the-court to stack his bread, and it’s arguably just as good. Let’s work backwards and cover it all real quick.
2024
Before the Raptors’ game against the Clippers on Jan. 26, sportsbooks predicted Porter would have 5.5 points, 4.5 rebounds, 1.5 assists and 0.5 made threes.
If you don’t know sports betting, this means that if you wanted to bet on Porter points that night, you’d either pick the “under”—meaning you think he’d score 5 points or less, or the “over”—meaning you think he’d score 6 points or more. Same gist applies for each of the other statistical categories. Now that we got that out of the way…
Porter played 4 minutes that game before exiting due to what was recorded as a re-aggravated eye injury. He recorded a dime and 3 boards. He didn’t attempt a shot. Whatever. Dude only played 4 minutes; that’s not unheard of.
The next day, though, ESPN reported that DraftKings reported that the most money bettors made the previous night was betting the under on Porter’s made threes line (basically, a ton of money was bet, and made, on people betting that Porter wouldn’t make a 3 against the Clippers). January 26 was a stacked night in the NBA, too. Sixteen teams played that night, including plenty of stars (Luka had 73 that night and Book dropped 62) who generally attract the lion’s share of bettors’ interest.
Fast forward a bit to March 20. The Raptors play the Kings, Porter logs just 3 minutes and his statline is lower than what the sportsbooks predicted. The next day, per ESPN, DraftKings reports that people who bet against Jontay Porter made more money than anyone else who bet on basketball that night.
So now it’s happened twice. Red flags go up, and dude is placed on leave.
A source from another sportsbook told ESPN that people were attempting to place bets up to $20,000 on Porter.
By the way, if you tossed $100 on all of Porter’s unders to hit that night, you’d turn your $100 into $1,400. If you threw down $80,000, you’d stand to walk away with $1,120,000.
PRE-2024
Let’s start with a money-focused Twitter account Jontay has linked to from his main Twitter account: @TayTrades11. It’s full of advice and commentary on stocks and crypto trading. It was most active in 2022, when Porter wasn’t signed to an NBA team, but the account has posted as recently as this month.
A lot of the financial lingo is way out of this writer’s ballpark, but the account posts about making between $20K and $40K.
The account has referenced college hoops parlays in the past.
Porter backed up his online presence when he went onto the “Bound to be Rich” podcast in September 2022 and told stories about turning $5K into $100K and even $50K into $200K in just three days through trading on RobinHood, an app for trading stocks and crypto.
On the pod, whose thumbnail says that Porter “outperforms hedge funds,” he says, “I think I go against a lot of the typical rules of safe traders … I just try to grow it as quickly as possible.”
Porter is listed as a co-founder of a company called The Financial Cloud, whose mission is “To help members pursue Financial Freedom Through Trading by designing a system that makes trading easier, faster, and more accurate, so members can spend more time doing what they love.” In the company’s official Discord server, a TayTrades11 is listed as the owner of the server and chats amongst its users about making money via trading.
We hopped into the server to find members in the free section of the server discussing the news.
The premium section of the server was locked when we joined Tuesday afternoon.
Photo via Getty Images.
