u/JoeBiden2020FTW

PG13 with a well rounded 13. 5 steals in 25 minutes is nuts. That's Jaylen Brown's career high lol.

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> This Clippers penalty is dumb.

> My son is in tears asking why I didn’t raise him a Laker fan (lol). I’ve got 3 years left on my season tickets. Why decimate a franchise? Who’s being punished?

> Leagues should operate from a view that the owners are stewards of the fans’ team.

> If the owner actually did this, the league should be able to make him sell the team. That’s the punishment (the market is great for teams)! No more billionaire toys. Ownership is a privilege not a right.

> It’s happened before to this very franchise!

> At a minimum the owner should be given the choice to accept the penalty (once his legal options are exhausted) or sell the team. We’d help him decide that pretty quickly. A generation of invested fans shouldn’t bear the death penalty because of a bad actor? The plot is lost.

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Interesting drop from Lowe. Seems like the Clippers only have to give away a pick in those years, doesn't necessarily have to be their own picks. They might be able to use some future Raptors picks this way too.

Still seems like a miracle that they were able to keep the #5 pick in 2026.

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> “It was to set all this shit straight,” Turner said. “And we made a couple million bucks more, so that’s fine too. This is what’s funny to me. Everybody’s like, ‘Aaron fucked up.’ I’m like, hold on. Did I fumble something? Because fumbling would mean like next year, if JK is making $10 million a year, you could say I fumbled by not taking [three years for $75 million]. You can’t say I fumbled because I didn’t fumble anything yet.

> “We made a choice. Now, if I turned down two years, $45 million, and two weeks later got two weeks, $40 million, I fumbled, right? I went backward. Most people, if you had to negotiate for two more weeks to make a couple million dollars more, wouldn’t you do that? Isn’t that my job?”

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> Just like Joker can profess his loyalty to the Nuggets, there's still going to be teams that are positioning themselves and monitoring that and that kind of thing.

> And it's the same thing with Luka. He's done nothing but express optimism and excitement about the Lakers since he signed that extension. But it's not that long term of an extension. And you better believe that there's teams around the league that are looking at that situation and saying hey, if this thing goes sideways, we'd sure love to get Luka midway through his prime.

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Kind of a wild twist and turn to a story that starts with the AD trade press conference.

> On July 13, 2019, the Lakers held a news conference at the team's practice facility to introduce superstar big man Anthony Davis. The trade with the New Orleans Pelicans to pair Davis with LeBron James instantly vaulted the Lakers back into title contention after the team had struggled for nearly a decade under Jeanie's stewardship.

> Jesse called Jeanie later that day, and he asked about Pelinka's remark about Johnny. The conversation took a dark turn, multiple people told ESPN, when Jeanie began to tell a story about her mother, JoAnn.

> Six months earlier, in December 2018, the six siblings had learned about a woman named Lee Klose, who had written to Jeanie and said that she had been the first child of JoAnn and Jerry Buss.

> Lee was born in 1953, and, at the time, JoAnn and Jerry Buss lacked the financial resources to support her, so they made the difficult decision to place her up for adoption. But JoAnn made Buss promise her that he'd never have children with anyone else. He agreed. The couple would later divorce in 1972.

> Janie learned about that promise many years ago from her mother, JoAnn, who said she was heartbroken when Buss later had two sons with his girlfriend Karen Demel in the mid-1980s. But Janie said that JoAnn ultimately supported Buss and those two sons, who were named Joey and Jesse.

> Given that promise between her mother and father, Jeanie told Jesse, "You should've never been born."

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Ty Lawson going in on Pablo. He was recently arrested around a month ago for shoplifting some alcohol.

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Another big name trying to downplay the Clippers stuff. Pretty interesting.

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Sir, a 3rd undisclosed no-show sponsor has just been exposed

> The league's investigation examined deals with companies including Daktronics and Boingo Wireless, a wireless provider for the Intuit Dome, sources familiar with the inquiry said. Earlier this month, Torre reported that Leonard had a previously undisclosed sponsorship agreement allegedly worth millions of dollars with Daktronics, the South Dakota-based company that designed the Clippers' videoboard inside the Intuit Dome. But like Aspiration, there's no evidence that Ballmer funneled money through those companies, and in the recent discussions, the league has focused on those companies only in the context of the Clippers introducing them to Leonard and his representatives, sources said.

> A spokesperson for Boingo did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Daktronics has declined to comment on anything related to Leonard or the Clippers.

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It seems like the league schedulers might be operating like Kawhi won't be on the Raptors this year.

2018-19 Source

2026-27 Source

Interesting scoop from Christian Clark at The Athletic:

> At this point, it remains unclear if Klay Thompson — the Mavericks’ leading 3-point shooter in each of the past two seasons — will be back in Dallas for a third year. The Mavericks have explored his trade market but have yet to find a deal, multiple sources with rival teams told The Athletic on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss any potential negotiations. Thompson is owed $17.5 million this season and is set to become an unrestricted free agent in the summer of 2027.

> My understanding is that Thompson would welcome a return to Los Angeles, where he spent part of his childhood and still owns a home. The Miami Heat are another team frequently mentioned in NBA circles as a potential landing spot for the future Hall of Famer.

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Fascinating semantics debate going on here:

> Despite the inactivity, Leonard and the Clippers were considered a vital part of Aspiration’s portfolio. The team and its star were priorities for the company, those people said, though their understanding of the reasons differ.

> One person recalls Sanberg saying that the Leonard deal came with an understanding the team and the company would work on more deals together, and that the two were linked, though not as an explicit quid pro quo. The Clippers, this former executive said, wanted Aspiration to do the deal with Leonard.

> “I didn’t think of it so much as a quid pro quo but as a ‘you scratch my back, I scratch yours,’” the person explained. “I know there’s a fine line but it doesn’t seem one was tied to the other.”

> Another former executive disputed the notion that the Leonard deal was seen as a way to ensure more business with the Clippers. “Paying Kawhi was important,” they said, but so were the relationships with the franchise and Ballmer in general. The Clippers relationship was understood to be a high priority.

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Interesting stuff at his introductory press conference:

> “Our position would be that the system should not require a player to carry all that burden,” incoming NBPA executive director David Kelly said at his introductory press conference Friday, just before the details of Wembanyama’s extension became public. “It should not put a player in a position where he has to carry the burden in order to keep a team together. A system that does that, we have a problem.”

He also seemed to like the Brad Stevens idea:

> He supported an idea Stevens brought up in that same news conference that would allow teams to pay players a full maximum contract with supermax eligibility, but only have those deals count as 25 percent of the salary cap.

> “We actually think that makes sense around certain issues around the second apron, whether it’s drafted players, whether it’s a Bird exception for certain players,” Kelly said. “The ability to keep teams together, I think, will help fan interest and will still allow for player movement, but allow players to have the decision of staying where they want to stay.”

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