History will laud Stern for his vision on a sure bet

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For the millions of Americans who gamble on sports, predominantly with illegal bookmakers or nefarious Web sites, the arrival of NBA All-Star Weekend to Las Vegas is equivalent to the Berlin Wall coming down.

The NBA, NFL and other pro leagues have become multi-billion dollar industries in no small part because of the passion created by gambling. The relationship is nurtured by the leagues who feed out the daily injury reports that keep the point spreads honest.

In public, however, the same leagues equate gambling to a parasite and claim to wish that sports betting never existed -- knowing full well their leagues wouldn't be nearly so popular if that wish came true.

All of that is about to change. I'm betting 50 years from now the groundwork being laid this week by commissioner David Stern, which will ultimately produce an NBA team in Las Vegas, will go down as one of the most important and innovative moves of his career. It will spike interest in his league, make his owners richer than ever and change the way all pro sports are run in this country.

Stern has long maintained he would have nothing to do with Las Vegas so long as the local sports books accepted wagers on NBA games. That changed in 2004 (around the time SI was preparing a story that predicted Las Vegas would receive a pro sports team within the decade) when, according to a senior league official, the NBA began looking informally into Las Vegas as a potential site for All-Star Weekend. The same idea would occur to Joe and Gavin Maloof, the owners of the Sacramento Kings as well as the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. With Stern's endorsement, they arranged for the local sports books to take the 2007 All-Star Game off the board.

But the key point here, as the official insists, is the NBA had already been considering a relationship with Las Vegas.

The NBA understood putting its showcase event in Las Vegas would open the door for a team to relocate there. Las Vegas is one of the nation's fastest-growing cities, with a bottomless clientele of hotel-casinoes to buy up the suites as giveaways for its most lucrative customers, and high-rollers who will pay for the courtside seats and luxury amenities that drive NBA revenues these days. That's a huge consideration: Unlike the NFL, which makes most of its money from national TV contracts, the majority of team revenue in the NBA still comes from the gate, and especially the most expensive seats nearest the court.

Now that Stern has altered his position on Las Vegas, conceding publicly for the first time this week he must essentially let his owners decide whether a team should play there, you can be sure the NBA will be moving to Las Vegas soon. (Insiders maintain relocation by an existing franchise is far more likely than expansion.) "They'd like to put five teams there,'' jokes the NBA senior official.

On Wednesday Stern invited Mayor Oscar Goodman to come up with a compromise on sports betting that would further encourage an NBA team to move to Las Vegas.

With revenues plateauing, NBA owners will welcome the shot of fresh revenue and energy Las Vegas will provide. But I don't think they realize the enormous possibilities that should go with their new appraisal of sports betting.

Let's say the NBA compromises with the city on a pro version of the UNLV rule, in which the Vegas sports books will agree to take games involving the local NBA team off their boards -- though wagers on other NBA games would be permitted. That rule will be a temporary measure. In a few years it will probably go away, just as the original UNLV rule did in 2001 when the authorities realized it served no purpose. There has been no hint of scandal in the six years UNLV games have been on the board.

The byproduct of putting a team in Las Vegas will be a wiser and ultimately more profitable approach to sports gambling.