Prediction Markets Are Coming for Your Favorite Sport, Says NBA Star Tristan Thompson

Prediction markets emerged as a political fixture last year, but now they’re making a big splash in the big leagues, according to NBA star Tristan Thompson.

With a growing list of partnerships and acquisitions, it probably won’t be long before odds from platforms like Polymarket become a common way for people to gauge the pulse of their favorite teams and athletes in real time, he said in an interview with Decrypt.

“This will happen,” he said, recalling how television channels like TNT began incorporating social media posts into their broadcasts years ago, allowing viewers to engage with familiar faces like Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley from their couch.

Last year, the prediction markets followed the swings in the presidential elections of the United States, which could play out over the course of weeks. For sports, Thompson imagines a graph in the bottom corner of his TV, which “gives up from possession to possession” for less than a handful of hours.

In practice, sporting events can last only moments. For example, the fastest knockout in the history of the UFC happened 5 seconds after the opening bell, and earlier this week, the company of the MMA organization. caught a multi-year agreement with Polymarket.

As part of the arrangement, a fan prediction scoreboard is integrated into UFC broadcasts, visualizing global fan sentiment and fight predictions as events unfold.

In the first eight months of this year, Americans bet $99 billion through commercial sportsbooks, up 12% from the same period a year ago, according to the American Gaming Association. And most sports broadcasts feature betting odds.

In recent months, courts have begun to address the question of whether prediction markets are subject to a patchwork of state gaming regulations, with some encountersbut Thompson sees his nature as distinct from your average bookie.

“Vegas and gambling are definitely big sectors in America,” he said. “More importantly, I think with forecast markets, […] it’s actually going to drive higher viewership ratings.”

By design, prediction markets allow individuals to abandon bets before settling. That could encourage people to follow events more closely, considering that an opportunistic exit is not always reflected by traditional statistics, Thompson said.

“It’s hard to tell how a game is going just by looking at the scoreboard,” he said.

Thompson himself supports a project called Basketball.fun, where users can speculate on NBA talent in a way that parallels an unaffiliated project called Football.fun. The last project began to stir elements of trading card games with fantasy sports in August.

Last month, the NHL became the first major sports league to reach a multi-year partnership with prediction markets, touching both Polymarket and its biggest rival Kalshi. The brokerage Robinhood is also began to leave customers access the sports prediction markets this year.

DraftKings, the fantasy sports giant, acquired forecast market company Railbird for an undisclosed amount in October. In a press release, however, the company said its offering focuses on “finance, culture and entertainment.”