Kawhi Leonard and an American scandal: how one case could upend the NBA’s golden era

The soul of the NBA is on the line, hyperbole or not. These are the times: we overuse exaggeration yet shrink from it when excess would actually fit. US pro leagues run on a salary-cap economy – what each franchise can spend on player pay – which, basic as it is and despite its exceptions and (sometimes) contradictions, functions as the closest thing to a guarantor of competitive balance and rotation at the top. It’s the yellow-brick road for clubs that do things right, whoever they are and wherever they play. Like any playground game, it only works if no one cheats.

From there come the exceptions, nuances and endlessly open arguments, all shifting with collective bargaining deals that swerve to fix the unintended consequences of the last swerve. The NBA runs a soft cap – a Gruyère wheel riddled with asterisks – not the NFL’s hard cap, an absolute wall. It’s set off a percentage (roughly 50%) of projected basketball related income (BRI): TV rights, ticketing, concessions and game-tied sponsorships.

There’s also a floor – 90% of the cap – to ensure players get the money they generate. The top end explodes via luxury-tax tiers and contract devices that legally bridge the cap, which for 2025–26 sits at $154.6 million, a big jump thanks to the new TV deals after $140.6 million last season. That’s why the range is so stark: the Suns spent a combined $366.6 million in salaries and tax, while the Pistons spent $141.6 million. Twenty-eight clubs sit in between.

The NBA system’s roadmap

Those differences – perfectly legal and no guarantee of joy for big spenders (see the Suns) – sit alongside obvious gaps in what teams generate: brands, markets, and how much fame (and its sibling, fortune) they can build for their players. Even so, the cap stitches the system together, warts and all, competitively and financially. Not only on the floor: half the luxury-tax haul goes from payers to non-payers, typically helping small markets whose owners often (and sometimes very cynically) lecture about spending. There are more folds if you go looking: franchise values are sky-high (the Celtics north of $6 billion, the Lakers north of $10 billion…), partly tied to this spending/investment logic. What numbers would current and future owners face if part of their annual outlay lived in a shadow economy? No one wants to pluck the golden goose right now. That should mean policing bad practice at least as much as looking the other way in the Adam Silver–brand pax romana.

The commissioner has kept everyone marching in step, selling a sense of horizontal relationships rather than the vertical reality of any business. Owners dislike parts of today’s NBA (expansion talk, or rather, stalemate) and players – especially the middle class – already see provisions they’d change in the latest CBA. But both sides signed with minimal drama. There’s so much money that even the unfair bits come padded with cash. League revenues are around $12 billion a year; average franchise value sits near $5 billion; player payrolls top $11 billion. Most stakeholders with a voice would rather not touch a thing. And now the new TV era is unsealed – a golden age, at least financially, guaranteed for the medium term.

No one – least of all Adam Silver – wants a scare while the issue isn’t who wants in but how to manage the queue: vast fortunes, investment funds, sovereign capital. Those are the problems he prefers, and he’s shown (see the risky door opened to betting) that his job is to make the league and its members very rich. That’s a capitalist reality, however often it’s tinted with (not always consistent) progressivism. A problem he does not want: deciding what to do about Steve Ballmer, the Los Angeles Clippers owner – former Microsoft CEO, the richest owner in US sports and the world’s eighth-wealthiest (north of $120 billion). An obviously valuable partner who took a flimsy, toxic punchline of a franchise and gave it athletic and social legitimacy, plus a gleaming new arena Silver happily visited for photo-ops.

Fair enough, perhaps – but it’s plain the league doesn’t want the guns trained on the Clippers. Silver says he’ll only act on very conclusive proof, and you can see it in the way ESPN is covering this – scaffolding for a decision that’s soft or non-existent. It’s hard to square the tone (or lack of it) in some reports and panels. ESPN (Disney) is a major league partner, and figures like Ramona Shelburne – whose slant here is becoming obvious – have been closely aligned with the Clippers. Ballmer arrived in 2014 and spent heavily to reshape his team’s media relations. In 2018, he quietly hired Lee Jenkins, then among the NBA’s most plugged-in, respected voices – the journalist who wrote LeBron James’s letter announcing his return to Cleveland in 2014.

On one hand, the facts look serious enough that it’s hard to believe nothing will happen – not just to Ballmer and the Clippers but to Kawhi Leonard and his circle, who don’t look like passive bystanders and whose threads are easy to tie given what’s out there. The league is weighing, supposedly, how clearly the Clippers signed on. On the other hand, you can sense machinery spinning to ensure nothing happens. Yes, there’s an ongoing investigation and many unknowns. But what has surfaced already is scandalous – grave.

You can’t convict with absolute certainty; but scratch the surface and the whole painting looks deeply suspect. It’s hard to swallow the Clippers’ and parts of the NBA media’s ask: a chain of improbable coincidences. Bobby Marks leans on the idea that it all stinks, perhaps rotten, but can’t be proved. We’ll see – unless we accept that what’s known already could suffice given how the NBA system works and how abnormal this interlocking series of events is. The CBA allows for that. Silver has called salary-cap circumvention a “cardinal sin,” and the new CBA is built to keep ultra-wealthy owners from remaking the league at will. So… we’ll see.

A new Steve Ballmer?

It’s telling that Ballmer spoke only to Shelburne on ESPN – an intensive PR rubdown. Maybe that was legal advice he wouldn’t need if things were as clean and shallow as he suggested. Even in that gentle setting, he was unconvincing. He cited a 2021 marketing deal under which Aspiration paid $300 million for sponsorships that didn’t include naming rights, despite the company’s wish, and said that within that relationship (he also held under 3% of the company) he connected Aspiration with Leonard. After that, he claimed, he knew nothing. Ever. And he twisted language when asked whether Leonard’s camp sought extra favors beyond the Clippers contract: “Kawhi and his uncle know the rules. We do, too… we make sure to remind ourselves of them… it’s important they follow them, as they have.”

He also said he hadn’t looked at the documents published days earlier – none of what Pablo Torre showed – not even out of curiosity; he hadn’t spoken with the principals or their camps; he was a victim of a plot he had nothing to do with. One of capitalism’s most powerful figures, a longtime motivational evangelist for progress and sharp thinking, cast himself as the weak link in a chain that played him and that he hardly tried to understand. At minimum, odd. It’s a tale of two Ballmers with few convincing arguments beyond overuse of his (in many ways real) altruism. And a basic point many prefer to ignore: both realities can coexist – Aspiration may have fleeced Ballmer and illegal maneuvering may still have occurred tied to his stewardship of the Clippers.

Now, the facts that followed Torre’s investigation and their implications could threaten the NBA’s very system –the league’s soul. Beyond making many look foolish, this could set a point-by-point playbook for owners and power players: “how to do it… without the NBA proving it.” The allegation: the Clippers routed extra money to Leonard outside what the cap allows. Cap circumvention rarely hits the public front page, but it’s grave – a shot at the first line of the rulebook. John Hollinger says many owners want clear answers and a firm hand; some expected a more visibly worried Silver when this surfaced. He cites process and timeline, promises “nuclear” options if needed, but nowhere says he’ll use them. He even claimed he’d barely heard of Aspiration until days ago – despite it being, among other things, a multimillion-dollar partner of a league franchise he oversees.

A very dirty-looking game

Aspiration filed for bankruptcy in March. Since then it has faced fraud claims, and co-founder Joseph Sanberg pleaded guilty to financial crimes tied to investor deception. Among the creditors: KL2 Aspire LLC, linked to Leonard (he’s listed as its manager), still seeking $7 million from the bankrupt company, which had a $28 million deal with him despite no evidence he did anything to earn it.

In parallel, Ballmer took part in a capital raise and invested $50 million in Aspiration. He considers himself another victim. The obvious suspicion: that money was routed to pump Leonard’s income and ensure the opaque star never stopped being a Clipper. That is explicitly banned, and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz is investigating on the NBA’s behalf – the same firm that dug through the toxic mess that forced Robert Sarver to sell the Suns and the racist scandal that ousted Donald Sterling, who turned the Clippers into his image and was forced to sell in 2014. After Sterling came Ballmer, who paid $2 billion – then the second-highest price for a US sports franchise. Today, the little brother in L.A. is valued at $5.5 billion, with a glittering new Inglewood arena and an ultra-ambitious project that failed on the court but kept the team relevant, led most recently by Paul George and, above all, Leonard.

Documents shown by Torre display Leonard’s signature on the $28 million agreement, paid in installments over four years (2022–25), conditional on him remaining a Clipper at all times. The franchise gave him a max in 2019 after his title and Finals MVP with Toronto, another max-level extension in 2021, and in 2024 he signed again for three years at below his maximum.

There’s more. After the Clippers, Ballmer, ESPN and others mounted their defense for a few days, Torre dropped a second podcast episode – material that cut sharply against the talking points already on the table.

The new reveal: In December 2022, as Aspiration spiraled and stopped paying bills – including what it owed Leonard – Dennis J. Wong, a Clippers minority owner and Ballmer’s former Harvard roommate, invested nearly $2 million in the sinking company. Almost immediately, Aspiration made a $1.75 million payment due to Leonard – on the same day it laid off 100 employees (about 20% of staff). Former workers told Torre it made no rational sense to invest then, and the amount looked suspiciously tailored.

Media added fuel: a Boston report, echoed by Torre, pointed to another secret $20 million for Leonard – $48 million total – with zero promotional work. Aspiration didn’t even trumpet the deal, odd given brands usually blast these partnerships.

Torre cited a former Aspiration employee calling it a “no-show job,” with internal LOLs over a cap dodge everyone recognized.

The CBA defines cap circumvention as a team striking or facilitating a deal through a sponsor/third party to pay a rostered player for purported non-basketball services that are drastically above market – a backdoor way to add money outside the cap to keep him from listening to offers or to sign for less.

That’s a first-order offense. There are precedents: a 1993 look at Chris Dudley’s deal; a 1996 scheme floated by agent David Falk to funnel hotel money to Michael Jordan (never formalized); and the Joe Smith case in Minnesota, which brought crushing penalties – millions in fines, voided rights, five years without first-rounders.

The CBA sets tiered punishments: fines starting in the mid-millions, loss of a first-round pick, even voiding the implicated contract; at the top tier, bigger fines, suspensions for personnel, multiple firsts forfeited.

Days later, John Karalis pushed the totals toward $48 million, pointing squarely at Dennis Robertson – Uncle Dennis – whose demands were notorious when Leonard hit free agency in 2019.

The league probed back then whether the Clippers jumped through those hoops, found no smoking gun, but the same mud is back in today’s flood. Internally at Aspiration, executives weren’t looped in; legal, finance and marketing were bypassed; normal diligence and rollout never happened.

Torre calls it a “no-show job”; Karalis adds they never even tried to build synergy – their focus was climate-linked influencers, not Leonard. Meanwhile Ballmer’s $50 million came with paying above other investors’ share price, odd given whales typically get discounts.

Ballmer was fined in 2015 over unauthorized sponsorship assurances to DeAndre Jordan and still sat on an audit group for moves like these. It’s not hard to imagine why Silver might dread staging the next All-Star at Ballmer’s luxe Intuit Dome with the owner under fire.

The Clippers denied any cap dodge. Shelburne floated a 2021 $550 million naming-rights bid from Aspiration – framed as proof of normal dealings – though the team chose Intuit at $300 million. That doesn’t bolster Ballmer’s amnesia: he dealt with Aspiration yet supposedly left $250 million on the table out of mistrust, only to cut another $300 million deal later. Or was the $550 million a squeeze play?

The same playbook in Toronto

With the hornet’s nest stirred, more hornets arrived. Bruce Arthur reported what Leonard’s camp demanded in Toronto in 2019 – equity in the Maple Leafs’ parent group, acquiring Paul George, and sponsorships worth at least $10 million a year requiring no real work.

Arthur says when the Raptors offered to line up brands, the response from Uncle Dennis was blunt: “we don’t want to do anything.” If a sponsor pays, they’ll want ads and appearances; Robertson wanted the money without obligations.

A clear NBA dilemma followed. Sam Amick writes that the Lakers also heard some of those asks; Jeanie Buss walked immediately, and the Lakers won a title in 2020. The Clippers needed Leonard – not just as a basketball star but as legitimacy – and they have one of the ten richest people on Earth in charge. Temptation meets leverage.

Howard Beck calls this potentially one of the century’s biggest NBA scandals, with outcomes ranging from historic punishment to nothing. Executives around the league say the sums are extreme for any legit deal and the fact Leonard did nothing is the reddest flag. The “everyone does it” line, they say, is nonsense: not everyone can slip $48 million under the table.

There’s room for small-scale cynicism around the cap – handshake nudges on options, a loaned jet, a dealer’s free car, a $150,000 ad shoot to tip a signing – but nothing remotely like this.

One more key point: the NBA will hunt for documents, emails, texts – the kind that surfaced in Glen Taylor/Joe Smith’s case. But a smoking gun isn’t required. Under Article XIII, circumstantial evidence can suffice if a deal “cannot be rationally explained.” That could make this ultimately indefensible for the Clippers, Ballmer, Leonard and ESPN’s heaviest hitters – if it isn’t already.

John Hollinger notes that in potential cap-circumvention cases, arbitration comes first; only if facts are found does Silver sanction. He also deadpans that $28 million for doing nothing is “substantially above” market – even if Leonard had spent four years planting trees, the numbers are wildly out of line for a local sponsor.

Lastly, Hollinger expects the next CBA to impose explicit institutional responsibility, as the NCAA did in the NIL era: teams won’t be able to plead ignorance. That’s one loophole the Clippers lean on now. We’ll see how that goes – because what’s at stake is the NBA’s legitimacy. If this doesn’t bring an exemplary penalty, cap circumvention will become virtually undetectable, and many will howl – including those praying the games start so talk of Leonard, his uncle, a near-infinite-money owner, a commissioner who knows his pawns and kings, and these power plays (perhaps indecent ones) will just fade. A made-in-America scandal.

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