Adam Silver and the NBA brought the hammer down on the Clippers.
Announcing the findings and penalties from a year-long investigation into the Clippers using team sponsors and business partners to circumvent the salary cap and funnel more money to Kawhi Leonard, the league came down with the harshest penalties in league history:
• The Clippers surrender five first-round draft picks (2029, 2030, 2031, 2032, and 2033).
• The Clippers are fined $30 million.
• Clippers owner Steve Ballmer is suspended from anything to do with the team or the league for one year.
• Clippers President of Business Operations Gillian Zucker is suspended for one year, while President of Basketball Operations Lawrence Frank is suspended for six months.
• Kawhi Leonard must pay a $700,000 fine, and his already-fired business manager, Dennis Robertson (better known as “Uncle Dennis”), is banned from conducting NBA business for five years.
So who came out on top and who was the loser here? Let’s break it down.
Winner: Kawhi Leonard
While Kawhi Leonard is paying a healthy fine — although still just a fraction of what he made on those “no-show” endorsements — it is the Clippers and Leonard’s management who take the hit here. That’s largely because Leonard had layers of protection, including the NBPA. A source with knowledge of the situation told NBC Sports only the players’ union could force the arbitration process — a neutral arbitrator who could rule on the fairness of all the punishments in relation to the evidence — but with the union and Leonard agreeing to the terms, there is no arbitration.
Leonard will make all of the $50.3 million on his contract this season, and the trade sending him to Toronto that was in place but on pause will go through in the coming days. That puts Leonard in a city (and country) where he is a legend and adored, and is out of the U.S. media spotlight. Plus, Leonard already has his new representation talking to Toronto about a contract extension there. This has gone about as well as it could for Leonard.
Loser: Steve Ballmer
Steve Ballmer is the kind of owner you want for your team — he cares, he’s emotional, he shows up to every game, and he’s willing to spend. He lives and dies with the team.
Banning him from being around the Clippers or being involved with its business for a year will hit him hard personally. The $30 million fine is pocket change to a guy worth $152 billion, but the loss of draft picks that will seriously hamper team building for at least eight years further hurts the thing he loves. And now he can’t be around it for a year.
Which is why he’s going to fight this, almost certainly in the courts. Which leads us to…
Winner: Lawyers on Ballmer’s payroll
Ballmer will not go quietly into that good night. His attorney, David Kelley, already wrote a lengthy letter to the league and Adam Silver which said, in part, “We are exploring every legal remedy to address this gross injustice.”
Ballmer is not selling the team — he just built the Intuit Dome — and he is going to fight this. The likely way that happens is through the courts. Ballmer has the money and willingness to drag this out and make it ugly, and the only winner from that will be the lawyers getting paid by the hour to enact his vengeance.
Loser: Clippers
The Clippers 2027 first-round pick is a swap with the Thunder. Philadelphia controls the Clippers’ 2028 pick dating back to the Paul George trade. Then the sanctions kick in, costing them five straight first-round picks through 2033.
That just destroys most paths to team building — first-round picks, either as inexpensive players who can help a team or as leverage in a trade, are the lifeblood of team building. The Clippers still have a couple in the next few years via trade, but their paths to building anything close to the Lob City era (fueled by the Blake Griffin pick) or even the Paul George/Kawhi Leonard era seem daunting, at best.
For the record, to land George and Leonard, then eventually trade them away, the Clippers gave up 10 first-round picks and a variety of players, including Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. The result was one trip to the Western Conference Finals. (To be fair, there may not be an Intuit Dome without those guys.)
Loser: Clippers fans
This team is just cursed, and its fans are the ones suffering. It’s hard enough to root for “the other team” in Los Angeles — and make no mistake, for everything Ballmer has done right to raise the profile of the Clippers, and it’s a lot, Los Angeles is a Lakers’ town — but to see them now facing a potential decade of mediocrity because of this is just brutal. It’s not fair to the fans.
Winner: Pablo Torre
Vindication.
Torre broke the story of a Leonard “no-show” endorsement deal with Aspiration on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast, which led to this investigation. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on this issue. Yet, he took a lot of verbal hits both from the Clippers and a lot of people online — and in the mainstream media at points, clearly using Clippers sources — and he just kept coming up with more and more. Like the Daktronics sponsorship for Leonard. As the investigation dragged on, the critical voices grew louder.
Vindication.
Winner: Adam Silver
There were plenty of people around the league who questioned if Silver was really going to bring the hammer down on the league’s richest owner — honestly, I was one of those.
Silver did. He knows Ballmer is going to fight this, and it’s going to be loud and messy. But Silver did what is best for the game, he stood up to the world’s ninth-richest man, and he stood up for the NBA’s system and salary cap. That was a strong play.
Good on Adam Silver.
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