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It isn’t every day that you see the NBA chasing the NCAA’s tail, but when it comes to money, I suppose anything’s possible. Not on the level, I grant you — but possible.
And so it is that the Los Angeles Clippers not only re-signed then-superstar Kawhi Leonard to a big fat contract back in 2021, but may have kicked in a very collegiate-type sweetener to make the whole deal go down easier. In this case, the sweetener was a $28 million no-show job with an environmental start-up to which the Clippers’ owner, mega-billionaire Steve Ballmer, had coincidentally kicked $50 million in seed money.
The start-up is now bankrupt, its co-founder having pled guilty to defrauding investors. Kawhi, still a player with the Clippers, appears to have received most but not all of his non-job money. (His LLC is actually listed as a creditor in the bankruptcy proceedings, owed $7 mil.) Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO, says, Hey, I didn’t know nothin’. The NBA says it’ll look into things.
Allegedly!
This is all brought to you by the reporting of Pablo S. Torre. For those who can’t place him, Torre worked at both Sports Illustrated and ESPN (he was on TV a fair amount) before joining a media company run by former colleague Dan LeBatard.
Torre, long known for his investigative reporting ability, was at SI and ESPN when both were journalistic stalwarts. Sports Illustrated is now a burnt husk, and ESPN has become the National Football League, which is kind of interesting.
At any rate, Torre isn’t often wrong. In this case, he’s got a stack of documents that he says are from Aspiration, the ill-fated environmental company. On his podcast, he notes that he has reviewed Aspiration’s internal emails and contracts with Ballmer and Leonard. Torre says Ballmer agreed to wire $50 million to the start-up in September 2021, a month after Leonard signed a team-friendly, four-year, $176 million contract extension with the Clippers.
(Let me pause here. “Team friendly” and $176 million wouldn’t seem to go together so hot, and it is indeed a fine line. In 2021, Leonard signed that deal to remain with the Clippers. It gets wonky, but he could have gone for $187 million. That’s all there is to that.)
A few weeks after Ballmer is reported to have agreed to wire the money, the Clippers announced Aspiration as its team sponsor at a $300 million price. But the more interesting facet of Torre’s reporting is that he got eight former Aspiration employees to speak with him, and convinced one of them to go on the record about the Leonard deal, albeit under cover of anonymity.
“We went through a litany of really, really top-tier name contracts, and then (someone said), ‘Oh, by the way, we also have a marketing deal with Kawhi Leonard, like a $28 million organic marketing sponsorship deal with Kawhi,’” this person told Torre. “And (they’d say) that if I had any questions about it, essentially don’t (ask), because it was to ‘circumvent the salary cap, LOL.’ There was lots of LOL when things were shared.”
Not sure who’s LOLing now. Ballmer and the Clippers deny knowing about the payments to Leonard. “Neither Mr. Ballmer nor the Clippers circumvented the salary-cap or engaged in any misconduct related to Aspiration. Any contrary assertion is provably false,” the club said in a statement to The Athletic. “Neither the Clippers nor Mr. Ballmer was aware of any improper activity by Aspiration…The team and Mr. Ballmer stand ready to assist law enforcement in any way they can.”
That’s good to know. For the record, this is the second time in Leonard’s six years with the Clips that either he or his negotiators have been reported to seek improper benefits from teams. Ballmer and the Clippers, meanwhile, got fined $250,000 in 2015 for including a side hustle for free agent DeAndre Jordan, a Lexus deal that would’ve paid him $200,000 a year.
It’s just so college! These sorts of analog cheat schemes take us back to the good/bad old days of NCAA football players getting envelopes of cash stuffed into their shirt pockets during “get togethers” with boosters — not to mention the litany of jobs at which they never appeared, much less put in a lick of work.
It was such a simple time. Kinda still works for me. Above all, it’s encouraging to know that one can sign a $176 million contract and still (allegedly!) need just a little more — the never-ending road.
I’d say this is “inconceivable!” (IYKYK).
But, then again…it’s actually diabolical🦹🏻♂️…🏀…💰