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One rule I’ve developed in years of writing about financial scandals is that, as bad as a scheme appears at first, it’s more likely than not that the facts will turn out to be nastier than they appeared at first.
Case in point: The scandal swirling around the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Assn. and their billionaire owner, former Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer.
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The story was initially broken one year ago by sports podcaster Pablo Torre, who reported on a suspect endorsement deal between a sustainability company named Aspiration and All-Star forward Kawhi Leonard that smelled like an attempt to circumvent the NBA’s strict salary cap. (Torre won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.)
I have no idea why we’d do this.
Aspiration executive questioning its “endorsement” deal with Kawhi Leonard
By Sept. 2, when the NBA issued a series of nuclear sanctions against the team and Ballmer, it had become much bigger. The team, according to an investigative report the league released, actually orchestrated endorsement deals for Leonard with four companies that had been angling for business arrangements with the team, not just one, and took steps to hide the deals from public view.
Because of the extent to which these deals violated league rules and perhaps because the Clippers are repeat offenders (they were fined $250,000 in 2015 for a similar endorsement scheme involving then-free agent DeAndre Jordan), the league hit the team with its maximum penalties.
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It fined the team $30 million and took away its first-round draft picks for five years, 2029-2033 (the team already had ceded its first-round picks for the next two years in trade deals). It suspended Ballmer from any league or team activities for one year and imposed a one-year suspension on Gillian Zucker, the team’s president of business operations, and a six-month ban on Lawrence Frank, its president of basketball operations.
The Clippers said they “vehemently reject” the accusations and called them the product of a “heavily biased investigation.” They said they would appeal the sanctions, though it’s unclear how they could…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/hiltzik-nba-report-ballmer-clippers-100000872.html
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Publish date : 2026-09-10 10:00:00
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