This week New Jersey took steps to bring sports betting to its casinos and racetracks. Last week NBA commissioner Adam Silver said sports betting in more states is inevitable. Do these twin developments mean legal sports gambling is coming to a betting parlor near you?

Well, maybe someday, but don’t bet on it just yet.

New Jersey’s acting attorney general issued a directive Monday telling the state’s casinos and racetracks they are free to take sports bets without fear of state reprisal, so long as no wagering occurs on college games in New Jersey or involving in-state college teams anywhere. Trouble is, federal law still forbids sports betting in most of the U.S.

That’s because of New Jersey’s own Bill Bradley, the former NBA star and former U.S. Senator who pushed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which limits sports gambling to the four states that had it when the law passed in 1992, meaning sports lotteries in Delaware, Oregon and Montana and licensed sports pools in Nevada.

But New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s administration is attempting to exploit a loophole in the law.

“I believe this is the beginning of the end of the ban on sports betting across the country,” State Senator Raymond Lesniak tells USA TODAY Sports. “It’s a little bit complicated, but I’m telling you now is the time to book your hotel rooms in Atlantic City for the Super Bowl because we are going to sell out.”

New Jersey wants to get into the sports betting business to help its Atlantic City casinos, which have been hit with hard times and a rash of closings. Lesniak believes bettors will want to come to Atlantic City for major sporting events such as the Super Bowl and the Final Four if the state offers sports betting.

“Las Vegas during the big events, you cannot get a room there,” Lesniak says. “People like to be where the action is and that’s the attraction Atlantic City is missing.”

Carl Braunlich, a member of the gaming faculty at UNLV’s International Gaming Institute, thinks even if New Jersey is successful in getting legal sports betting that it wouldn’t be a panacea. He agrees that Las Vegas fills up for big-time sporting events but says this amounts to only a few times a year.

Voters in New Jersey endorsed sports betting by a wide margin in a 2011 referendum. State lawmakers, led by Lesniak, enacted a law to allow sports betting at casinos and tracks and Christie signed it into law in 2012. But the NCAA and major pro sports leagues sued New Jersey based on the Bradley Act, as the federal law is sometimes known, and won in court.

The NCAA, NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL declined comment or offered no comment on New Jersey’s latest gambit. But the NBA might have a different position today — then the leagues argued that sports betting undermined the integrity of their sports — given Silver’s comments last week at the Bloomberg Business Summit in New York.

“It’s inevitable that if all these states are broke that there will be legalized sports betting in more states than Nevada and we will ultimately participate in that,” Silver said. “If you have gentleman’s bet or a small wager on any kind of sports contest, it makes you that much more engaged in it. That’s where we’re going to see it pay dividends. If people are watching a game and clicking to bet on their smart phones, which is what people are doing in the United Kingdom right now, then it’s much more likely you’re going to stay tuned for a long time.”

Sports betting in Nevada, and what is proposed in New Jersey, requires that bettors be in the state when they bet, but UNLV’s Braunlich believes the trend among the young is toward illegal offshore betting on mobile devices.

“I deal with 2,000 college students in Nevada and the culture of young people now is you can bet on sports anywhere you want, you just get on these offshore betting sites,” Braunlich says. “No one is enforcing laws against this, at least not from the players’ perspective.”

The question in New Jersey revolves around enforcement. The federal law bans states from setting up regulatory schemes for sports betting. The loophole is that the state can apparently deregulate gambling, rather than regulating it. The theory is that casinos and racetracks would not be licensed for sports betting but they’d be free to offer it.

The Christie administration filed a motion in federal court this week asking U.S. District Court Judge Michael Shipp to hear a request that Shipp clarify or modify an injunction he issued in February 2013 that prevented the state from enacting sports betting. The state wants to be sure it can repeal its prohibition of sports wagering, which it says would be different from approving and authorizing it.

A federal appeals court ruling upheld the constitutionality of the Bradley Act but said New Jersey wouldn’t be prohibited from repealing its ban on sports wagering, a distinction not addressed in Shipp’s injunction.

Lesniak proposed bills this year that seized on the loophole but Christie vetoed them because of the federal law. Then, this week, as more Atlantic City casinos failed and as Lesniak gathered votes to override the veto, Christie’s administration offered the directive that tells county and municipal prosecutors and police that casinos and tracks would not be committing a criminal offense under state law if they operated sports pools.

“I can’t see any state following Christie’s lead on this,” says I. Nelson Rose, professor of law at Whittier Law School. “Basically, it is really quite bizarre for a governor to tell the regulated casinos and racetracks, ‘Well, we won’t enforce our anti-gambling laws and you should just go ahead and commit major federal felonies.’ I can’t imagine a federal prosecutor would agree with that interpretation. The only redeeming quality is he at least appears to be asking a federal judge to give a stamp of approval on this.”

Monmouth Park race track at first said it would offer sports betting as early as Sunday but now says it will wait 45 days. By then, the state expects to have a ruling on its motion.

“We’ve been fighting this for five years, so what’s another 45 days?” Lesniak says. “I don’t believe we had to go to court, but having a judicial ruling in our favor is helpful to the casino operators who have licenses in other states.”

Contributing: Bob Jordan and Michael Symons, Asbury Park Press