Ty Lue attended allegedly rigged Vegas poker game at which Chauncey Billups played

The NBA gambling scandal that rocked the league appears to be cutting deeper and deeper with each passing day.

After the FBI arrested Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups for his alleged involvement in a rigged poker game scandal that included X-ray vision tables and altered shuffling machines spearheaded by the syndicated crime families, investigative journalist Pablo Torre is now reporting that Clippers head coach Tyrone Lue was involved in one of the allegedly rigged poker games.

“According to multiple sources with direct knowledge of that April 2019 game in Vegas that we’ve been discussing — the same one where Billups was allegedly profiting off of an extremely suspicious hand and a rigged shuffling machine — another ‘face card’ in attendance was current Los Angeles Clippers head coach Ty Lue, who was at the time an assistant coach for the Clippers,” Torre said on his “Pablo Torre Finds Out” podcast.

Torre dove into Lue’s seemingly incredibly close ties to Billups.

“Now, sources say that Lue did not play at the same table as Chauncey Billups — the man Lue recently called his best friend, and also the man whom Lue would hire as a Clippers assistant himself the very next year, 2020, once Lue got his current head job,” Torre continued on his podcast.

After Billups’ arrest was announced, Lue defended his friend, calling Billups “my brother.”

“I know who he is as a person,” Lue told reporters early this week. “I’ve been with him since I was 17 years old.”

Lue’s love for poker is well known in the community, but he also has close ties to Damon Jones, who is implicated in this scheme after allegedly tipping off gamblers that LeBron James would not play in a Feb. 9, 2023 game against the Milwaukee Bucks.

“An open secret around the NBA is that Ty Lue, who lives in Vegas during the offseason, also loves poker,” Torre said, “and is often seen at what is considered the nexus of the NBA poker world — the Aria High Limit Bar — often alongside another retired NBA player whom Lue had separately hired to his coaching staff in Cleveland and who has called Lue his best friend, Damon Jones.”

Jones has repeatedly called Lue his best friend in interviews, and Lue even hired and promoted Jones to the Cavaliers coaching staff when he took over as head coach for David Blatt.

“In June of 2024, both Ty Lue and Damon Jones sat next to each other on the rail — the poker equivalent of courtside at a playoff game — to watch another friend of theirs compete at the World Series of Poker, as seen on the broadcast of that event,” Torre said.

Jones tried twice to file for Chapter 13 bankruptcy in Texas in 2013 and ’15, but both cases were dismissed, leaving creditors free to continue pursuing the debts owed, among them the Bellagio casino, which he owed nearly $50,000.

Jones and Billups are a part of a larger investigation surrounding the NBA’s gambling scandal that also includes Jontay Porter and Terry Rozier, who allegedly manipulated their own stats so that others could bet and win on their Unders at DraftKings, among other sportsbooks