Did prop bets just unnecessarily ruin Malik Beasley's career?

Good morning. Let's basketball.

Malik Beasley is no longer the subject of a federal gambling investigation, ESPN reported late last week, which is good news for Beasley and would be great news for Beasley if only he had a time machine and could go back to June 30 or so and convince the Detroit Pistons and everyone that he wasn't getting in trouble for betting on (or against) himself so they should just give him that 3-year, $42 million contract that had been in the works.

Alas. No time travel here. The Pistons had to quickly pivot and did, with Duncan Robinson among others. Beasley remains a free agent. The most likely path now is for the Pistons to sign him for $7.2 million for one year and for everyone to hope that there isn't another huge red flag that drops in late June next summer.

This is a disaster. Beasley is reputed to be awful with money and generally irresponsible, and so it's easier to believe he'd get mixed up in some gambling nonsense like Jontay Porter. But there was never anything firm implicating him in weird bets. In fact, in the one weird betting situation that federal agents leaked out, Beasley easily avoided the under with zero indication he knew there was an under he was supposed to hit. That's either an indication that he's so bad with money that he didn't realize he was supposed to not rebound the ball or it's an indication he wasn't involved. But when you are under federal investigation, everyone assumes the prosecutors have ... something. Apparently, they did not.

Two lessons in this, as I see it: