One of the most interesting aspects of the investigation into Kawhi Leonard’s no-show deal with Aspiration is the way former Dallas Mavericks majority owner Mark Cuban is playing the devil’s advocate. The billionaire has rather vocally defended Leonard, the Los Angeles Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer, challenging Pablo Torre at every fresh drop of evidence, arguing that the accused aren’t the villains that the podcaster is painting them out to be.
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Cuban’s battle to this point has been valiant, if a little curious, since he ostensibly has no dog in the fight. Torre, however, has been able to counter each claim or suggestion that Cuban has made, but credit to him for continuing to fight the good fight.
Cuban appeared on Pablo Torre Finds Out again this morning for a deep-dive conversation, and this time, he suggested that the reason Leonard’s deal with Aspiration was never announced is that four days earlier, the tree-planting company announced a huge deal with the Boston Red Sox.
“Rule No. 1 in marketing — When you’re getting PR, and you signed a big deal, you don’t step on it,” he said. “And so once I saw that they had done this big deal and realized how big it was, it made perfect sense why they didn’t announce it then.”
That all sounds plausible, if a little odd that you’d consummate two deals so close to one another rather than spacing them out. Cuban’s explanation for why the deal was never announced or mentioned in any way after that, though, doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny.
“After that … they changed over the focus of their business, and as best we can tell, nobody wanted [Leonard] there, nobody wanted to do the deal, and so there was no reason to announce it. That’s my perception,” he said.
Torre kept returning to his original question, which was simple but very pointed. “Why did no one ever say that this deal existed at all, in any way, ever?” Cuban said that Torre couldn’t know that, but the reporting has been so extensive to this point that if Aspiration, Leonard or the Clippers had mentioned it at any point, that certainly would have been uncovered by now.
If they had, they themselves would have released it to help prove their innocence. But they didn’t, because this deal was kept under the table, because it was arguably designed to circumvent the NBA salary cap.
Occam’s razor says in essence, keep it simple, stupid. The simplest reason is usually the right one, so while Cuban tries to create this circuitous chain of events under which it might sort of, technically, be plausible that no shenanigans occurred, it’s a little difficult to buy.
“They announced with celebrities all the time,” Torre said. “‘We signed Leo DiCaprio, and we signed Drake, and we signed Robert Downey Jr. and Orlando Bloom and Cindy Crawford and Cindy Crawford’s daughter.”
When Cuban asked about the timing of those announcements, Torre came back with, “Is your argument going to be that by the time they signed Kawhi Leonard to a deal that was four times larger than everyone else combined in that celebrity roster, they had decided to no longer care about celebrities?”
Cuban bet that Joe Sanberg, Aspiration’s co-founder, “activated” the deal by using it to get close to Leonard for some courtside pictures or to rub elbows with business interests. Cuban said that he himself used to do the same thing all the time at every Mavs game, where he would take pictures or sign autographs for fans.
What this all comes down to is Torre is backing up each of his claims with evidence, while Cuban just keeps throwing out hypotheticals, all of which would have to have happened to somehow make this deal make sense in an above board kind of way.
Cuban is trying his best here, but like Leonard during one of his many load management days, he doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
