What a change===== On Dec. 11, 2009, commissioner David Stern told SI.com (the web site for Sports Illustrated) that legalized gambling on the NBA "May be a huge opportunity"

We are also hearing that if we legalize sports betting we will stop the illegal sports betting in the state. We know it  can't  true ! But what we do know is that if you add a new form of gambling more people try it and some of those people will become addicted. The proof to that test is that we heard that when lottery came into effect we were going to stop the illegal numbers games. In fact that never happened. One of the reasons are that you can still get credit from a "runner" when you play an illegal number, and today some stores that sell lottery tickets, still allow known players to run up a tab and pay when they can.  In fact, when I was the executive director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of NJ (1986-1994) we did a survey that Gallup conducted for us. Two of the questions on the survey were: Have you ever played illegal numbers? 31% of the respondents said "yes". Second question was: Do you play legal lottery in the state of NJ. 81% said "yes".