Michael Porter Jr. speaks on Jontay Porter’s gambling investigation

DENVER—Denver Nuggets star forward Michael Porter Jr.’s brother Jontay Porter is at the center of an NBA investigation into irregularities surrounding prop bets based on his statistics.

Jontay, a player on the Toronto Raptors, is a year younger than MPJ and has gotten a second crack at the NBA this season after bouncing around the G League. Jontay, a former Nuggets summer leaguer, could be the subject of the biggest sports betting scandal since the legalization of it spread across the country in recent years. If there’s evidence that Porter placed bets and possibly threw stats and/or games to cash in on bets, he’d be the first to break that barrier since the most recent boom.

ESPN first reported the story on Monday, saying the NBA is looking into two games where Porter exited early due to suspicious injuries while staying under his prop totals—which ended up being DraftKings’ biggest winner of the day.

Porter has missed the last few Raptors games for personal reasons.

His brother played for the Nuggets on Wednesday, speaking to the media after the game for the first time since the ESPN story came out.

“Not necessarily anything I want to say, no,” MPJ said. “I mean, I know what you guys know. I know that Jontay loves the game of basketball. You know, he’s really excited to play. He has been really excited to play with the Raptors. So, yeah I know, just as much as you guys know, at this point, you know, I know that I’ve know my brother my whole life. I know what type of dude he is. And I know he’s excited to play basketball. And I highly doubt he would highly doubt he would do anything to put that in jeopardy.”

Michael Porter Jr. on his brother Jontay Porter’s situation and sports gambling around the NBA.

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Porter continued with his general thoughts on sports gambling.

“Especially the last few years you hear more you know people in the crowd saying what they need you to score tonight or you know what they don’t want you to score,” he said. “Every night you’re disappointing someone. You’re disappointed the people if you score too much because they made have bet on your under and you disappointed people if you didn’t score enough so it’s part of it’s part of the game now. I think that it’s obviously a dangerous habit. It’s a dangerous vice for people I think you know, the love of money is the root of all evil. So I think that even though it is a thing we as players just have to accept that I don’t think we should—We get we get paid a lot of money to play this game and I know the people these fans they want to make some money as well. So if they want to put their hard earnings on us we appreciate that you put your trust in us, I guess but it’s definitely something that is kind of taken over the sport’s world. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. So I mean that’s that’s probably my comments on it”

Porter is in his fifth NBA season and is coming off a championship run. The former top high school prospect in the country was drafted in the first round by the Nuggets in 2018 and has battled many injuries to now be having a career season for the top-seeded team in the West.