The National Basketball Association (NBA) on Monday announced a series of agreements to establish a comprehensive framework for NBA-related prediction markets, including a memorandum of understanding with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Under the agreements, the NBA has also designated Kalshi and Polymarket as the league’s preferred prediction market exchanges.
The agreements with Kalshi and Polymarket put in place significant integrity protections for NBA-related markets, including limitations on permissible markets, prohibitions on trading event contracts by league and team personnel, and information-sharing relating to investigations and suspicious trading.
“Protecting the integrity of the game is our top priority,” said Scott Kaufman-Ross, NBA head of media distribution and partnerships. “As this category develops, we believe it is important to work constructively with regulators and operators to help ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place.”
As preferred prediction markets, each platform will receive rights to use NBA intellectual property, marketing rights, and promotional activations across media channels within the United States. They will also receive official NBA data from Sportradar to operate and settle authorized NBA-related markets.
“Sportradar is proud to support the NBA’s entry into prediction markets as the league’s exclusive data provider,” the company said in an email. “Through our existing partnerships with Kalshi and Polymarket, official NBA data will now power both platforms.”
In addition to its preferred partnerships with Kalshi and Polymarket, the NBA has expanded its agreement with DraftKings to include prediction markets and nationwide promotion. The NBA plans to expand its relationship with other current official sports betting partners, and others in the industry, in the coming weeks, the league said.
The NBA follows the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball, which previously entered partnerships with Kalshi and Polymarket. The National Football League remains opposed to sports-event contracts.
In an amicus brief supporting New Jersey’s regulator in their case against Kalshi, the NFL argues sports-event contracts are gambling, not financial swaps that should be regulated exclusively by the CFTC.
The legal battle is over whether states or the federal government have exclusive authority to regulate sports-event contracts on prediction platforms. New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruling that barred the state from enforcing its gambling laws.
Kaufman-Ross told ESPN the NBA is not planning to weigh in on the potential Supreme Court case, while confirming that the league’s contracts with Kalshi and Polymarket address the possibility of sports-event contracts no longer being available.
“The jurisdictional issue is not our issue; our issue is the way that our game is impacted,” he told ESPN.
CFTC Chairman Michael Selig welcomed the agreements between the league, Kalshi, and Polymarket.
“I’m pleased the CFTC and NBA signed an MOU, which continues the commission’s commitment to increasing data sharing between the agency and professional sports leagues,” Selig said in a statement.
Selig said the NBA joins the MLB and NHL in “taking a responsible step toward protecting sports integrity and market participants from abuses in prediction markets like insider trading and fraud.”
