![[Pablo Torre] On Ballmer’s apology: “He is not admitting to wrongdoing that has been investigated and proven on our show and by the NBA. And that is notable. It’s because the question of his own admission of guilt is at the heart of what the DOJ is looking into. It is key to what the SEC is probing”](https://external-preview.redd.it/4BruErzOgQ9EfowTSET7W5lSdgSkbLSt78bKGPV5stg.jpeg?width=140&height=140&crop=1:1,smart&auto=webp&s=cf4dfbe85be3304a8414deb19b569c9dde5072cc)
Source: https://imgur.com/a/SRT39bu
Pablo Torre on X:
P.S. To process the Kawhi trade, the NBA first needs to approve the Clippers' temp governor.
Ballmer and one of his alternates, Gillian Zucker, are both banned. Ballmer's other alternate?
Clippers co-owner — and Aspiration investor — Dennis Wong. But would the NBA approve that?
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7567031/2026/09/06/nba-punishment-clippers-future-garland-ingram/
The problem the Clippers have is that they don’t have future Hall-of-Famers on the court anymore. A team led by Garland and Ingram represents the lowest Clippers ceiling of the 2020s, and both are injury-prone players. Garland has missed an average of 19 games per season over the last five years, while Ingram has missed an average of 30 games per season over the last five years. Defensive coordinator Jeff Van Gundy will also have his work cut out for him since he has to account for stars who aren’t consistently strong defenders, as well as not having a 30-minute stalwart at center like Zubac
Longer term, Frank isn’t going to be around to run the front office, and the NBA’s “compliance and monitoring program” that the Clippers are now subject to during the next five years behooves them to not try any funny business to keep in contact with Frank. Ballmer’s financial assets are most evident in how the organization buttressed the front-office depth over the past decade, a process that started when Rivers was stripped of his title as president of basketball operations in 2017, putting Frank in charge of a bolstered group that included Michael Winger, Trent Redden, Mark Hughes and the late Jerry West. Redden is now the general manager, and Hughes is now the senior vice president and assistant general manager. Those two will be expected to lead while Frank is away.
As actor Paul Scheer’s phone buzzed Wednesday afternoon, the messages let him know he’d been cast in a part he knew exactly how to play.
His role? Embarrassed Clippers fan.
Scheer, best known for starring in FX’s “The League” and Showtime’s “Black Monday,” had moved to Los Angeles in need of a team to get behind. The city’s best Bad News Bears story appealed to him. The end of the Donald Sterling era featured the most talented rosters in Clippers history, and the energy from new owner Steve Ballmer had him all in for the other team in town.
But as news broke Wednesday afternoon that the NBA had found the Clippers guilty of salary cap circumvention with Kawhi Leonard, text after text reminded him of his fandom fate.
“You just feel that they will always be the laughingstock,” Scheer told *The Athletic* on Thursday. “And as a fan, you’re always fighting that. You remind people they have the (active 15-season) streak of winning seasons.
“And then something happens.”
Something happened when, according to a year-long investigation by the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the team improperly brokered multi-million dollar endorsement deals with multiple companies for Leonard. Something, of course, always seems to happen.
Something happened when Sports Illustrated called the Clippers the “worst sports franchise ever” on its cover in 2000. Something happened when Blake Griffin stepped on Lamar Odom’s ankle during a playoff practice and could hardly move for the rest of the 2013 postseason. Something happened when Donald Sterling’s racist rants were released in the middle of the 2014 playoff run. Something happened when Josh Smith and Corey Brewer took turns as the Splash Brothers in a Game 6 the year after. Something happened when Chris Paul got his hand caught in a Portland Trail Blazers player’s jersey, ending the 2016 playoff run with a broken bone. Something happened when the Clippers included a lanky rookie point guard named Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in a trade for Paul George. Something happened when Lou Williams broke COVID-19 protocols at Magic City in 2020.
And something happened last fall when the “Pablo Torre Finds Out” podcast published its first episode alleging that the Clippers’ broke NBA salary cap rules by getting Leonard an endorsement contract with the now-bankrupt environmental company Aspiration.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7562990/2026/09/04/pablo-torre-steve-ballmer-clippers-nba/
I really hope that people don’t think that the only way that you can trust reporting like this is if the entity or the institution that you’re investigating takes their hand and raises it and says, ‘Yes, the journalist was right.’
But I also hope that people can evaluate the work on its merits and learn to trust that our process is rigorous in ways that are bordering on unhealthily obsessive, which is a separate problem, but hopefully one that they can trust.
The sensation that I have felt personally and have felt in our audience — such that I can get a sense of what has been a head-spinning day — is that people have been almost delighted that maybe we can hold the richest people in the world to something resembling a standard of accountability.
I think that is what I feel most acutely: That maybe that’s possible. That maybe a collection of documentary evidence and human sources who are brave enough to talk to a journalist, and months of research that have been vetted legally and otherwise, can combine to create something like consequences at a time at which those extraordinarily wealthy people seem to be able to avoid them.
I think that we have the ability to do something that the rest of our culture is yearning for, which is make people who are too rich to care about anything resembling the public interest worry that maybe they need to tell us the truth.
From Dan Woike on X:
But what is their argument? Wachtell Lipton didn’t issue the sanctions; Silver did. And Silver, according to the NBA’s constitution and bylaws, has significant latitude to impose discipline.
Article 24 of the league’s constitution, “Authority and Duties of the Commissioner,” includes this: “The Commissioner shall have the power to suspend a Player, Coach, Member, Owner, or other person subject to the Commissioner’s jurisdiction for a definite or indefinite period and to impose such fines and other penalties as are authorized by Article 35, 35A or any other Article or Section relating thereto of this Constitution and By-Laws. The Commissioner shall have the power to declare null and void any Player transaction made by and between Members of the Association or by and between Members of the Association and any organization outside of the Association.”
And does Ballmer really want his organization to go to discovery in a courtroom? Owners don’t like depositions. Wachtell Lipton’s report detailed numerous contacts between the team and the companies that had not previously come to light, in advance of subsequent emails that the team claims provided the initial contacts between Leonard and the companies. Frank, according to the report, “openly discussed with investigators his conduct from the relevant time period, recalled details of key events, took responsibility for the actions of subordinates, and was generally consistent across his interviews,” as well as providing contemporaneous notes of meetings.
Over the last few years, multiple NBA teams have been gobbled up by incredibly wealthy individuals and groups, many well beyond “just” billionaire status. But Ballmer is richer than all of them.
But a law firm said, clearly, that his team broke the rules. And Adam Silver, himself trained at law, acted — unequivocally and decisively. He was his predecessor’s equal, and then some, in the moment.
Steve Ballmer spent billions to make Clippers matter, but he brought them more shame
Steve Ballmer was supposed to scrub Donald Sterling’s stain from the LA Clippers. Instead, he left one of his own.
Their offenses are not morally equivalent. Sterling disgraced the franchise with his racism; Ballmer corrupted its integrity.
Both men made ownership the organization’s greatest source of shame. Ballmer’s fall for using the team’s business relationships to obtain millions of dollars for Kawhi Leonard through salary-cap circumvention is especially jarring because he arrived as the antidote to everything Sterling poisoned.
Sterling spent decades turning the Clippers into the NBA’s cheapest, most incompetent and most disgraceful organization. By the time his racist comments forced him out, everything about the franchise felt contaminated.
Ballmer arrived as the cleanser.
He spent $2 billion not to buy a basketball team in 2014. He was performing an exorcism.
He had more money than he could ever spend and more enthusiasm than he could contain. He screamed at games, bounded across stages and attacked the Clippers’ irrelevance with the same intensity he once used to climb to the top of Microsoft.
He spent on players, coaches, executives and facilities. He built Intuit Dome, a $2 billion basketball palace and an 18,000-seat shrine to technological excess, finally freeing the Clippers from feeling like squatters in the Lakers’ arena and giving them a home meant to embody everything Sterling never did.
Sterling was cheap. Ballmer was lavish.
Sterling was indifferent. Ballmer was obsessed.
Sterling made the Clippers embarrassing. Ballmer made them relevant.
Now 12 years later, Ballmer is another disgrace in a franchise history overrun with them.
By the time Kawhi Leonard and his uncle, Dennis Robertson, asked for financial benefits outside the NBA’s salary cap during his free agency in 2019, the LA Clippers were familiar with the script.
In 2015, the Clippers, in an attempt to keep center DeAndre Jordan — one of that summer’s top free agents — presented him with an opportunity to earn extra cash as a spokesperson for Lexus. The idea, according to a source who was present for the planning, came from newly hired team president Gillian Zucker, an auto-racing executive and former Triple A baseball assistant general manager.
The Clippers were fined $250,000, the matter was internally chalked up to ignorance about the rules and the story quickly faded.
It was, as it turns out, a first rehearsal.
The results of a nearly year-long investigation by the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz at the behest of the NBA were released Wednesday and revealed Zucker was again at the center of plans to funnel money to a star player outside of the league’s agreed-upon rules. This time, the accusations were so severe that the league issued a series of penalties among the heaviest its ever given.
The report accuses Zucker of being a dishonest witness whose own accounts contradicted physical evidence. It treats her, along with Leonard and Robertson, as the scandal’s central figures. The findings mention her name 56 times — with Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank being mentioned a combined 52 times.
Still, this warning that was issued the Clippers’ way back then in my 2019 report is quite prescient now:
“(Silver) sees salary cap circumvention as a cardinal sin in the NBA, and will always keep a watchful eye on that front. If any relevant evidence of improper benefits surfaces in the future, the league will re-open the investigation and pursue the charges yet again.”
No matter what the NBA ultimately found here, the widespread perception that the Clippers had cheated created immense pressure on Silver to come down with some sort of discipline as a way to keep the other 29 teams in check. That was a familiar refrain from rival executives and owners in the (many) months leading to the ruling, with many of them warning that a lack of punishment for the Clippers would send a strong sign across the Association that these player recruitment rules were made to be broken.
“It’ll be open season,” as one general manager — who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation — put it.
As scare tactics go, it doesn’t get more terrifying than $30 million and five first-rounders going poof for the people who own and run these teams.
“(The NBA) had to (do this) for the integrity of the game,” that same general manager said after the ruling.
Yet the league not only came down hard here, but did so with the backing of the Wachtell report that makes it so hard to understand how the Clippers can continue to claim innocence.
Silver finished what the infamous Uncle Dennis had so recklessly started, really. And in the end, that was the call that mattered most.
Source: https://www.pablo.show/p/it-happened
From Pablo Torre:
If you’ve been following our (ongoing) investigation into the Clippers and Steve Ballmer and Kawhi Leonard, you know we’ve been waiting for this day for a year.
We published Part I on September 3rd, 2025.
This, Part 15, we streamed, live, last night — on September 2nd, 2026 — roughly 90 minutes after the NBA announced its punishment and the league’s outside counsel, Wachtell Lipton, dropped a detailed 35-page report.
Accountability for the wealthiest people on Earth is hard to come by.
Thank you for believing in the power of independent reporting to accomplish it.
(And, yes, more to come.)
Source: https://www.espn.com/nba/story/\_/id/49806356/nba-announces-punishments-clippers-kawhi-probe
A significant crux of this case appears to come down to the words "affirmative" and "responsive" as it pertained to how Leonard and the four companies arrived at endorsement deals.
In the investigator's report and in the Clippers' subsequent publicly-released response, each side accuses the other of a flawed theory in how interactions between Leonard and the four companies were handled.
The report repeatedly rejects the Clippers' argument that the connections were affirmative and, in some cases, cites admissions by the companies' themselves.
The details make for compelling reading. In the case of scoreboard maker Daktronics, for example, the investigators accuse the Clippers of directing a kickback from massive scoreboard contract for Intuit Dome to Leonard in the form of an endorsement deal and even setting the terms.
In other cases, the report cites the Clippers paying millions in "consulting" fees shortly after Leonard's endorsement deals were executed.
According to investigators, contemporaneous notes from Frank indicate that Robertson complained to Ballmer that Zucker, the president of business operations, was making "introductions" for "bulls- deals," and that "I have to get paid."
Investigators cited the same notes as saying Ballmer told Robertson that Clippers staff were "collective workers to try and help [Leonard] achieve his financial goals."
In addition to the notes written by Frank, who appears to have been given leniency for his cooperation, the report cites information that appears to have come from interviews with executives from the involved companies that created a compelling case.
The punishment was compounded by the Clippers being previous offenders during Ballmer's tenure as owner. They were fined $250,000 for a similar accusation involving DeAndre Jordan in 2015. There was also a 2019 investigation into Leonard's signing in which they were cleared of wrongdoing but subsequently warned and put through a seminar to remind them of the rules.
Also from Ramona:
Zucker has been the head of business operations for the Clippers since Ballmer bought the team, and was the point person on all four deals between the team sponsors who also had endorsement contracts with Leonard.
The report from Wachtell comes down harshly on her, concluding "when interviewed, she made misleading and false statements to investigators."
In one particularly detailed section of the report investigators wrote that when Aspiration co-founder Joseph Sanberg told her he wanted to explore an endorsement agreement with Leonard, she "told Mr. Sanberg that she would enlist a particular business agent to assist Mr. Sanberg in structuring the agreement -- a business agent who was then under a retention agreement with the Clippers."
One day later, the report concludes that Zucker reached out to the business agent to help Mr. Sanberg.
That agent then emailed internal colleagues about the deal -- that Sanberg would offer Leonard $5 million, plus $7 million in stock, per year for four years as long as Leonard was with the Clippers.
The investigators concluded that Zucker improperly conveyed to the agent the proposed financial terms contained in this email.
The agent told investigators that neither the agent nor the agent's internal team came up with those terms. All relevant witnesses [including Zucker] agreed that Sanberg could not have come up with those terms because he didn't have experience structuring player endorsement deals.
Boom, goes the Clippers.
Steve Ballmer has been tattered. Lawrence Frank has been shredded. Their team future has been flattened.
Boom, goes those damn Clippers.
They had transformed themselves from the ridiculed Clip Joint to a top-shelf NBA organization, with the billionaire owner, the beautiful arena, the best coach and the most devoted fans … but they apparently got greedy, seemingly played dirty, and now have been affixed with a scarlet eight letters that will follow them forever.
Cheaters.
The NBA has ruled that the Clippers are cheaters.
Ballmer, cheater. Frank, cheater. Even president of business operations Gillian Zucker, cheater.
The NBA suspended Ballmer and Zucker for one year and Frank for six months Wednesday for violating salary cap rules when they signed Kawhi Leonard in 2019.
In arguably the harshest punishment in sports since SMU was given college football’s death penalty in 1987 — this is even worse than the USC sucker punch of 2010 — the league added injury to insult by stripping the team of five consecutive draft picks from 2029 to 2033.
The league also fined the team $30 million and Leonard $700,000 but the issue here is not money.
The issue is trust.
How can any of the Clippers partners or sponsors or fans trust this team with their dollars or their time or their affection after they were apparently caught knowingly breaking one of the NBA’s cardinal rules?
You don’t mess with the salary cap. Period. It’s the one thing that keeps these disparate teams and markets competing on a level field. Period.
Yet according to the findings of a lengthy investigation by the NBA, the Clippers’ top three executives — Ballmer, Frank and Zucker — helped arrange rich endorsement deals for Leonard that allowed him to make considerably more money than his contract states. Leonard did little if any endorsing, collected the extra checks, and essentially was paid above and beyond the salary cap.
First-round draft picks stripped in 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032 and 2033
This is the most severe punishment for the Clippers. Stripping a team of first-round picks is the biggest way to affect its future and how it builds a roster, especially in today’s era of first- and second-apron penalties.
This franchise was already living in draft-pick hell because of the Paul George trade from the Oklahoma City Thunder. That helped the Clippers land Leonard during 2019 free agency, as they gave up five first-round picks, two pick swaps and two-time MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as part of the trade package. The Clippers still owe one more swap to OKC in the 2027 draft if the Thunder choose to exercise it.
LA Clippers first round picks
2018: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (Blake Griffin trade), Jerome Robinson (own)
2019: to MEM (Jeff Green trade)
2020: to NY (Marcus Morris trade)
2021: Keon Johnson
2022: to OKC (Paul George trade)
2023: swap to OKC
2024: to OKC
2025: swap to OKC
2026:…
Yikes! The draft process is expected to change after the 2029 draft, so we don’t quite know what the system will be then. We just know the Clippers currently don’t have any picks until 2034.