As more information continues to come out in the Kawhi Leonard-Clippers scandal, it puts the team owner, Steve Ballmer, and the NBA under a very sharp spotlight. Sports journalist Pablo Torre investigated the Los Angeles Clippers and Ballmer over suspicions of bending the league’s salary cap rules before breaking the story a couple of weeks back.
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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. More has come out this week. Thursday morning, Torre unveiled some texts from the two-time NBA champ’s uncle, Dennis.
The messages revealed how Aspiration paid Kawhi an extra $20 million, an amount that was over four times more than what all other endorsers made combined. The money that came through Aspiration co-founder Joe Sanberg’s personal LLC was linked 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. The team owners are not happy, at least according to Torre, who 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 Torre, who went on to explain Ballmer’s further involvement in 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.
Torre is correct. If the NBA plans to just sweep all of this under the rug, it would speak volumes about 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 Torre 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. Torre 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,” revealed Torre.
Other notable figures have commented on this story, including one of the NBA’s most famous ex-majority owners, Mark Cuban. The billionaire thought that Ballmer got scammed rather than being a part of a huge conspiracy to dish out some more money to Leonard.
Cuban even suggested that Ballmer, if he wanted to, could have funneled extra money to Kawhi through carbon credits at the Clippers’ new Intuit Arena. That would have been a sneakier way, he hinted. Well, those words are what Pablo used to further investigate, and he uncovered more.
“And so what Mark Cuban is saying there does actually make a ton of sense, I must admit,” Torre said on Thursday’s episode of his podcast. “Because Aspiration, for those not familiar, was functioning as a broker for carbon credits.”
As the evidence continues to stack up, the pushback becomes stronger. In a world that is already flooded with misinformation and a failure of consequences, will Kawhi and the Clips become the next example? Will proper justice be served if the crime is taken to court? Or will big money silence the hard work that Torre has been doing?
