PRNewswire – Adam Silver, NBA commissioner, recently said in a New York Times piece that sports betting should be legalized. There is a better way forward.

NHL Legend, Bernie Nicholls says: “I can see why the leagues would want to try to get their hands on the betting world and try to clean it up, but they are opening a door that can’t be closed. What happens when a team like the San Antonio Spurs rests their best players on a night where they are playing a bad team? The Spurs do this on a regular basis; what happens when the league is being called out for allowing them to ‘throw games.’ I’m not saying that they do throw games, or that they lost every time they rest their stars, but why open that door and offer the public the option of saying they are.”

The traditional fantasy sports format increased fan engagement. More recently, the creation of daily fantasy attracted further interest and created a lot of deal activity in the sports industry.

Nicholls continues: “The fantasy world took a ‘one day’ which ends up looking more like gambling, in my opinion. Fantasy sports as a season long investment, is fun and you can’t, usually, lose loads of money playing it. I’m sure there are big players in the fantasy world, but in a season long pool, at least you are not going broke over the course of a week, or month. Having the leagues tied to these daily fantasy leagues has some benefits out of the gate, but I’m not sure they are the ‘answer’ that these leagues are looking for.”

If daily fantasy is the state of affairs today, legalized sports betting is where the market is potentially headed. After all, NBA announced a deal with FanDuel Wednesday and Adam Silver’s opinion piece appeared Thursday. Legalizing sports betting, which happens to be the only system known that accomplishes speculation in sports at a mass scale seems like a natural next step. A natural next step, however, is not the same thing as the best way forward.

AllSportsMarket (ASM) is a sports stock market where you can buy and sell sports teams and get paid dividends as your teams win. In preparation for the future, ASM is presently trading all NBA, NFL and NHL teams 24 hours a day as a free-money app for Apple devices. It is a live demonstration of the 3 main future benefits:

Price Creation

Every financial instrument creates a price. The price of Microsoft, gold or oil is known. If sports will be traded like everything else, it should produce price information like everything else. Neither daily fantasy, nor sports betting is designed to do this and the stock market format also ensures that fortunes are not lost overnight.

Integrity Preservation

Even with careful monitoring, sports betting will always attract bad actors because there is so much at stake.

Designing the right incentives from the start provides a much better answer. On ASM, game-based payments are not at the levels where cheating makes sense. When people don’t have the incentive to cheat, they simply won’t. Knowing that, the public will be fully trusting instead of skeptical, which will lead to much deeper fan engagement.

Rebuilding the American Dream

The United States is built on the unshakeable belief that any hard working person can make it and that we all have equal access to opportunity. Recently, however, the overall confidence in the American dream has taken a big hit and nobody has offered any workable solutions. It needs to be restored. But how?

Combining sports and finance in socially beneficial ways makes it happen. People love sports and they are passionate about it. A well-functioning sports stock market will shatter the financial barrier for fans by creating new ways to make money based on sports. Collectively, our passion for sports will lead to entrepreneurship, jobs and growth.

Sports betting and fantasy for money are inferior systems that don’t create prices, preserve integrity or make a meaningful economic difference. There is a better way.