On Wednesday, after a meeting with all the NBA owners, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver sounded cautious, patient and a little bit zen about the investigation into the Clippers trying to circumvent the salary cap with team sponsor Aspiration. “I’m a big believer in due process and fairness, and we need to now let the investigation run its course,” Silver said. He said he wanted to see “substantial proof” of the Clippers’ wrongdoing and that the burden of proof was on the league.
On Thursday, new reporting from Pablo Torre and the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast (which initially broke the story) makes it harder to believe that the Clippers organization knew nothing. Here’s how the new reporting breaks down, with some background context added.
• In 2021, Kawhi Leonard signed a four-year, $28 million endorsement deal with Aspiration, a “green bank” company dealing in carbon credits (the company has since gone bankrupt, and its CEO pled guilty to bilking $248 million from investors). The way this endorsement paid out was $7 million a year, or quarterly payments of $1.75 million. At the crux of this controversy is the fact that Leonard did nothing for Aspiration to earn this money — no appearances, no marketing, not even a social media post. This was a “no-show” job. Employees with Aspiration said they were told not to question the Leonard contract and that this was to help the Clippers circumvent the salary cap.
• Clippers owner Steve Ballmer had invested $50 million personally in Aspiration back in 2021 (prior to the Leonard endorsement contract), and it had become a $300 million sponsor of the Clippers. Ballmer and the Clippers have said that while they introduced Leonard and Aspiration — as is permitted under league rules — they had no details about his endorsement deal, and that the Clippers ended their relationship with Aspiration in 2023 after it defaulted on their obligations. Ballmer told ESPN, “I was duped” by Aspiration (as were many other investors).
• The latest PTFO reporting focuses on the final months of 2022: In September of that year, Aspiration missed a quarterly $1.75 million payment to Leonard as the failing company was coming apart at the seams. This had Dennis Robertson — “Uncle Dennis,” Leonard business manager and uncle who had asked the Raptors for no-show endorsements during free agency in 2019, and asked the Lakers and Clippers for much more like a piece of the organization, a home, and use of a plane — hounding Aspiration for the money Leonard was owed (which flowed into a specially formed LLC for this endorsement money).
• Enter Dennis J. Wong — the vice chairman of the Clippers, a man who owns 1% of the team (Ballmer owns the other 99%). According to Aspiration bank records, on Dec. 6, 2022, Aspiration received a $1.99 million wire from Wong’s investment LLP. That came at a time when the company was hemorrhaging money, was in default and was not a good investment, company employees told Torre. All of that was public and disclosed, and Wong should have known about it.
• On Dec. 15, Leonard got his $1.75 million fall quarterly payment from Aspiration. That same day, Aspiration laid off 10% of its remaining workforce.
• A finance executive with Aspiration said this to Torre about Wong’s investment: “It is not a rational investment that someone would make. So it is very shocking to me that $2 million was made as an investment by Dennis Wong, who in my texts is identified as the ‘Clippers’ and Steve ‘Ballmer’s partner,’ a week before $1.75 million was paid to Kawhi.”
The NBA has hired an outside law firm to handle its investigation into Aspiration, the Clippers and the endorsement deal with Leonard. While the court of public opinion is in overdrive, Silver wants the league’s investigation to be completed before he and the other owners discuss any punishment for the Clippers — and Silver wanted evidence beyond the circumstantial.
“We and our investigators look at the totality of the evidence… I would be reluctant to act if there was sort of a mere appearance of impropriety,” Silver said. “I think that the goal of a full investigation is to find out if there really was impropriety.”
Ballmer and the Clippers can again claim plausible deniability here: Wong made a small investment in a company where his daughter worked to help prop them up, neither he nor the team knew anything about late payments to Leonard or anything to do with the endorsement deal. If Silver is holding out for a paper trail — an email where Ballmer or Wong make sure money gets to Lonard and Uncle Dennis — that is not going to exist, Ballmer is too smart to have done so (there was this kind of paper trail in 2000 when the league came down hard on the Timberwolves for circumventing the salary cap with Joe Smith). The Clippers can argue that this is something Aspiration and Uncle Dennis cooked up and they knew nothing.
However, the tsunami of circumstantial evidence and the timing of all of it — including Wong’s investment — is hard to ignore and brush aside as nothing. It’s going to be difficult for the other owners — who are unhappy with the thought that the richest of them circumvented the cap, giving the league a black eye — to say nothing happened here.
This has become a story that is not going away and will carry into the start of the NBA season, a dark cloud the league will not be happy about.
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