The National Basketball Association is now slime-identified with a crew of upstanders known as “Spook,” “Peso,” “Vez,” “Sugar,” “Black Tony,” “Scruli,” and “Doc,” thanks to the strenuous efforts of FBI Director Kash Patel to generate a headline. “Current and Former National Basketball Association Players and Four Other Individuals Charged in Widespread Sports Betting and Money Laundering Conspiracy,” Patel’s press office blared last week. At a podium flanked by prosecutors as he announced arrests tied to the charges, Patel said, “The fraud is mind-boggling.” But read the actual indictments—which tell a different, much thinner story—and you might begin to suspect that the nation’s top cop was running a small con of his own.

Patel got his headlines. A front-pager in The New York Times led with “N.B.A.” in describing the arrests for ““Gambling Schemes,” as did an article in The Washington Post, which announced that NBA “figures” had been arrested in the probe into “a mob-run rigged poker scheme.” But the indictments are startling for their paucity compared with the charges described in Patel’s boasts. Out of the more than 30 people charged by federal prosecutors for illicit-gaming offenses, just three are associated with the NBA, and most of the evidence has nothing to do with basketball games. The most prominent arrest was of Chauncey Billups, the Portland Trail Blazers’ head coach, who is not directly accused of basketball-related wrongdoing, but rather of wire fraud and money laundering in allegedly acting as a celebrity front man in a crooked Las Vegas poker game in 2019. What Patel and prosecutors did not say is that at the time, Billups was not even employed by the league or any of its teams.

Insider sports gambling is a legitimate crisis for the NBA and should not be minimized.