The biggest NBA lawsuits active in 2026 are a federal criminal case charging a current player and two coaches in a sports betting and rigged-poker scheme, a video privacy class action that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear in December 2025, an antitrust challenge over trading card licensing with Fanatics, consumer suits against the publisher of NBA 2K over virtual currency and loot boxes, and a broadcast rights dispute with Warner Bros. Discovery that settled in late 2024.
The 2025 Gambling and Poker Prosecution
On October 23, 2025, the FBI announced charges against more than 30 people across two related investigations filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York: an illegal sports betting conspiracy and a Mafia-run rigged poker operation. Three defendants have NBA ties: Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, former Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, and former player and coach Damon Jones.
Terry Rozier
Prosecutors allege that in March 2023, while playing for the Charlotte Hornets, Rozier accepted $100,000 to tip associates that he would fake an injury and leave a game against the New Orleans Pelicans early. According to the indictment, childhood friend Deniro Laster passed the information to social media influencer Marves Fairley, who relayed it to others who placed successful “under” bets on Rozier’s performance props on platforms including FanDuel and DraftKings. Because Rozier played better than planned before exiting, the payment was reportedly reduced to $70,000.
Rozier was initially charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. In May 2026, prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding sports bribery and honest services wire fraud conspiracy counts. He pleaded not guilty to all charges. His attorney, Jim Trusty, called the new indictment “a sad effort to make something stick.” Fairley pleaded guilty to seven charges on the same day the superseding indictment was filed.
The NBA placed Rozier on leave immediately after the arrests. Commissioner Adam Silver said he was “deeply disturbed” by the allegations and noted that the league had previously investigated the Hornets-Pelicans game for unusual betting activity but lacked the subpoena power available to federal investigators. The Miami Heat waived Rozier in April 2026. He remains free on $3 million bail. Trial is set for February 8, 2027, with a defense motion to dismiss pending. Rozier has also asked the court to modify bail conditions that prohibit him from communicating with Charlotte Hornets personnel, saying the restriction has effectively ended his NBA career; the league has formally opposed the change.
Chauncey Billups
Billups was charged in the separate poker indictment, which alleges a conspiracy running from 2019 to 2025 involving members and associates of the Bonanno, Gambino, and Genovese organized crime families. Prosecutors say the defendants used wireless technology, rigged shuffling machines, chip tray analyzers, x-ray tables, and specialized contact lenses to cheat victims out of at least $7 million in high-stakes Texas Hold’em games. Billups faces money laundering and wire fraud charges. He pleaded not guilty in November 2025.
The poker case names 31 defendants. As of June 2026, six have pleaded guilty, and prosecutors are negotiating with as many as 15 others. Discovery includes roughly 259 hours of audio and video recordings across 1,580 files, plus electronic evidence from multiple devices and more than 100,000 pages of financial and phone records. U.S. District Judge Ramon Reyes Jr. denied a prosecution request to push the trial to January 2027 and kept the November 2, 2026 date. Billups remains on unpaid administrative leave from the Trail Blazers and is living in the Denver area on $5 million bail. His defense attorney is Marc Mukasey.
Damon Jones
Jones, a former NBA player who was working as a volunteer coach with the Los Angeles Lakers, was charged in both indictments. On April 28, 2026, he became the first defendant to plead guilty, admitting to two felony counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He acknowledged providing insider information about prominent Lakers players to sports gamblers and serving as a “face card” whose job was to lure victims into rigged poker games in Miami and the Hamptons between 2020 and 2023. Two of his original four felony counts were dropped in the deal. He faces 21 to 27 months on the betting charge and 63 to 78 months on the poker charge, with prosecutors agreeing to recommend a 15-month reduction. Sentencing is scheduled for January 6, 2027.
Salazar v. NBA: The Video Privacy Class Action
Michael Salazar sued the NBA in 2022 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that the league violated the Video Privacy Protection Act, a 1988 federal statute that bars disclosing a customer’s viewing history without consent. Salazar signed up for the NBA’s free email newsletter, provided personal information including his email address, watched basketball highlights on NBA.com, and claimed the league transmitted that activity data to Meta through Facebook’s tracking pixel for targeted advertising.
The trial court dismissed the case in August 2023, ruling that Salazar did not qualify as a “consumer” or “subscriber” under the VPPA because he only watched free content. The Second Circuit reversed in October 2024, holding that signing up for the newsletter and providing personal details was enough to make him a subscriber, and that sharing his viewing data with Meta resembled the common-law tort of publicly disclosing private facts closely enough to constitute a real injury.
The NBA petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court in March 2025, arguing that the Second Circuit’s reading conflicts with rulings in the Third, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits, all of which have held that nonpublic, business-to-business data transfers do not amount to the concrete harm required for a lawsuit to proceed. The NFL filed a supporting brief. The NBA warned that if the ruling stood, it could “effectively destroy” the data-sharing practices that support free ad-supported online content.
On December 8, 2025, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, leaving the Second Circuit’s ruling intact and the circuit split unresolved. The lawsuit is active in the lower courts, where the district court still has to decide whether the NBA’s disclosure was “knowing,” whether Salazar consented through the NBA’s privacy policy, and whether a class-action waiver in the NBA’s terms of use applies. VPPA statutory damages can reach $2,500 per violation. In a class covering potentially millions of website visitors, exposure would be substantial.
Separately, the law firm Labaton Keller Sucharow is pursuing individual arbitration claims against the NBA on behalf of consumers who have NBA accounts and watched videos through the NBA app, seeking $2,500 or more per claimant under the same statute.
Fanatics Trading Card Antitrust Suit
In early 2025, a group of plaintiffs filed a proposed class action in the Southern District of New York alleging that Fanatics, the NBA, the NFL, MLB, and the leagues’ respective players’ associations conspired to monopolize the trading card market. The suit claimed Fanatics induced the leagues to grant exclusive licensing deals by offering them equity in Fanatics, and that the resulting lack of competition drove up card prices.
Chief U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain dismissed the complaint for lack of standing. For NBA and NFL products, the judge noted it was “impossible” for consumers to have bought Fanatics-licensed cards before the lawsuit was filed because those licenses had not yet taken effect. Two plaintiffs had bought MLB cards, but their claims failed because they did not adequately allege they paid inflated prices. The judge called the plaintiffs’ price comparisons between Fanatics and Panini products “entirely hypothetical” and “speculative,” faulting them for ignoring factors like production costs. Plaintiffs were given a few weeks to amend. As of mid-2026, the docket remains active but the status of any amended complaint is unclear.
NBA 2K Microtransaction Lawsuits
Take-Two Interactive, the publisher of the NBA 2K video game series, has faced multiple consumer suits over its use of virtual currency and loot box mechanics. None has reached class certification.
A 2022 lawsuit filed in Illinois on behalf of a minor alleged that Take-Two exploits young players by using non-refundable virtual currency to psychologically distance them from real spending, running limited-time sales with small-print disclaimers, and refusing to honor minors’ legal right to void contracts and obtain refunds. The case was moved from Winnebago County Circuit Court to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. In October 2022, a judge ordered the dispute into arbitration.
A second class action was filed in November 2023 in federal court in California by a minor identified as “J.A.” through his mother. That suit targets Take-Two’s practice of shutting down servers for older NBA 2K titles, which renders any leftover purchased virtual currency unusable. The complaint called the practice “theft.” In early 2024, Take-Two moved to dismiss, arguing that virtual currency is not the player’s property but a fiction governed entirely by the publisher’s terms of service. No resolution of that motion has been publicly reported.
As of mid-2026, no U.S. class action against Take-Two over NBA 2K has been certified, and claims are proceeding individually. The regulatory backdrop has shifted somewhat: in January 2025, the FTC reached a $20 million settlement with the developer of Genshin Impact over deceptive loot box practices involving children, and international courts have begun treating similar mechanics as gambling.
Warner Bros. Discovery Broadcast Rights Settlement
TNT Sports, owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, sued the NBA after the league rejected its attempt to match an 11-year, $1.8 billion annual deal the NBA had reached with Amazon for streaming rights. TNT argued the NBA “grossly misinterpreted” the matching rights in its existing contract.
The dispute settled in late 2024. Warner Bros. Discovery lost the right to air NBA games on TNT, ending a broadcasting partnership that began in 1989. In exchange, the company retained international NBA rights in northern Europe and Latin America, kept access to NBA content for Bleacher Report and House of Highlights, and continued operating NBA digital platforms including NBA TV. Warner Bros. Discovery also licensed its flagship studio show, Inside the NBA, to ESPN and ABC starting with the 2025-26 season.