No NBA story has been bigger this offseason than the Kawhi Leonard-Clippers scandal. And as more information continues to come out, it puts the league and its owner under a very sharp spotlight.
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A couple weeks ago, sports journalist Pablo Torre started digging into the Los Angeles Clippers and their owner, Steve Ballmer, over suspicions of bending the league’s salary cap rules. Torre reported that the team had allegedly steered millions more to Kawhi through a no-show position at Aspiration, a company that later went bankrupt.
Then just this morning, Torre unveiled some texts from the two-time NBA Champ’s Uncle Dennis that revealed how Aspiration paid Kawhi an extra $20 million over four times what all other endorsers made combined. The money that came through Joe Sanberg’s personal LLC, linking back to Ballmer’s investments in the company.
It’s bad news all around. Bad for Kawhi, Ballmer, and the NBA. Torre seems dead set on righting this horrific wrong, especially since other team owners are abiding by the rules. But they are not happy either, at least according to Torre himself. He spoke about it during his recent appearance on The Dan Le Batard Show.
“The journalism could not be more serious in terms of how real the paperwork is. Documentation is the story of investigative journalism, and we have the documentation,” stated Pablo, who went on to explain Ballmer’s further involvement with the scandal.
“When you do not have the documentation, in the absence of the note that says ‘I circumvented the cap, signed Steve,’ you’ve got to go to human sources, primary sources. I’ve given now seemingly an ongoing parade of that… I think this is a matter of whether you’re a serious league,” he added.
Pablo is correct. If the NBA plans to just sweep all of this under the rug it would speak volumes to what Adam Silver is really running behind the scenes. This not only goes against the very strict rules that franchises are expected to uphold, but might even prompt Torres to dig even further. What else might he find if he does that?
Well, he’ll probably find most of the other team owners following the rules. Torres mentioned that they are pissed off that Ballmer and the Clippers might potentially get nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
“I can say I’ve spoken to four [owners] who think that it’s absurd that this is something that the NBA would potentially not punish proportionally to the evidence.”
Other big names have commented on this story, including one of the NBA’s most famous ex-majority owners, Mark Cuban. The billionaire personally thought that Ballmer got scammed rather than was a part of a huge conspiracy to dish out some more money to Leonard.
He even suggested that Ballmer could have funneled extra money to Kawhi through carbon credits at the Clippers’ new Intuit Arena, which would have been a much sneakier way. Well, those words are what Pablo used to further investigate, and he uncovered that was lining up.
“And so what Mark Cuban is saying there does actually make a ton of sense, I must admit,” Torre said on today’s episode of his podcast. “Because Aspiration, for those not familiar, was functioning as a broker for carbon credits.”
