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The initial headlines were shocking: Five first-round picks taken away, Steve Ballmer suspended for a year, head of basketball operations Lawrence Frank suspended for six months, a $30 million fine. The loss of all those first-round picks is as close to an organizational death sentence as the NBA can hand out.
How the league got to the point Commissioner Adam Silver felt he had to bring the hammer down is detailed in the 36-page summary of the Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz report (the law firm that did the actual investigation for the league).
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How we got here
That report starts with something reported here and elsewhere: That when Kawhi Leonard was a free agent in 2019, his business manager Dennis Robertson — “Uncle Dennis” as he is more commonly known (now suspended from league business for five years) — asked the Raptors, Lakers, Clippers and every other team that reached out with wild requests, such as buying him a house or car, partial team ownership, and no-show endorsement deals. The NBA investigated at the time but found nothing, and the report agrees that the Clippers did nothing at that time.
However, less than a year later in the spring of 2020 (at the height of the pandemic), Robertson was putting pressure on the Clippers to, in the words of the report, “facilitate off-court business opportunities for Mr. Leonard.” The report went on to say Ballmer told Robertson, “he and Clippers’ personnel were all ‘collective workers to try to help [Mr. Leonard] achieve his financial goals,’ and Ms. Zucker assured Mr. Robertson that Mr. Ballmer would ‘follow through on his promise.'”
The Clippers knew Leonard had a looming contract extension (which he ultimately signed in August of 2021), and so Robertson had some leverage.
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How does the report know all this? Because Frank took (and retained) detailed notes from a meeting that involved him, Ballmer, Zucker and Robertson. Frank left a paper trail.
The endorsements
Within a few months of that meeting, Gillian Zucker, the president of business operations for the Clippers (now suspended for a year), set up connections for Robertson and Leonard…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/more-details-pour-nba-findings-191046674.html
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Publish date : 2026-09-03 19:10:00
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