[Pablo Torre] Steve Balmer paid Kawhi Leonard under the table to avoid salary cap

Am I the only one who doesn’t care about this story. The clippers and kawhi have been largely forgotten for years.

To me a bigger breaking story would be Pablo securing an interview with Chael sonnen and getting Chael to reveal who he and LeBrons drug supplier is and how LeBron is passing these drug test for hgh/EPO with and also to get all the names specifically connected to the now defunct biogenesis lab.

this kawhi story i guess is still a big story, but how are you gonna punish them when they don’t own their picks till like 2030 and all of their best players are way over 30

 

The problem with that is my "little bit pregnant" comment. 2019 happened, this happened. Ballmer is guilty and still lying. Plead bargains happen BEFORE NBA launches investigation that it now has to go all the way on. If not for Pablo forcing the issue I think Silver would have done nothing. The owners will demand blood now.

 

Terrible take here.

The moment any sports league "doesn't care" about blatant cheating is the day the league loses all credibility.

 

How have you never heard of scott foster?

 

Well, the NBA doesn't really have a lot of credibility over the years. It will only get worse if they don't deal seriously with this scandal.

 

this

also i would think the "alledged" goat of the nba, not publicy responding to that allegations from a weird but usually correct athelete who was on a podcast with over 2 million views and just casually said lebron and tiger woods used steriods. Lebron hears and sees everything like most narcissist which is why he sued that tiny "ai deepfake" company. Also for tiger i could maybe understand given his back injuries., For Lebron.. NOO especially since he is playing at a level that is questionable for his age. When barry bonds was winning mvps at 39 it was just as questionable. Im sorry kawhi and clippers dont move me at this point. Kawhi is injured just walking to the intuit dome

 

Lebron getting exposed for PED's>>>>>> Whatever this under the table stuff is

The NBA can punish Ballmer but he is still the richest owner in all of pro sports

 

Compared to stuff like foster though this is just SUCH a nothing issue (if you're willing to acknowledge this happens all the time, for those who live in delusion land and think this is unique of course it's different)

 

It's a different species of harm. Crappy officiating is one thing, bad. Owners cheating the salary cap to get an unfair advantage over other team is a different species of harm.

I actually don't believe there are that many $28 million secret no-show endorsement contracts with other stars from shady team-affiliated sponsors.

People who think this "happens all the time" need to show - some evidence - of it happening all the time?

 

Agreed with SamFisher. There might be handshake promises here and there, under table deals here and there. But this one is huge.

If there are similarly sized cheating cases uncovered and are proved to be widespread, then they pretty much admit that the whole salary cap is a joke. All the interest and discussions generated by trades and free agency will lose meaning. One of the main reasons why the NBA team building and GMing are so intriguing is the cap. If you take that out, they will lose a lot of fan interest.

 

If you consider the foster stuff to be "crappy officiating" than we are so far apart that there's no point in even talking about this, but fair enough everyone is entitled to their opinion.

I'm not in the nba world so i don't have a way to prove all of the other stuff outside of the miami stuff i've talked about.

 

Torre already investigated LeBron about attending Kobe's funeral. According to him, there is no proof that he did go.

 

The league did basically just that, they just used different words.

"Tim Donaghy was the only ref doing this"

 

damn

 

"a lone wolf donaghy was"

scott foster is so impactful that somehow, james harden has a 65% regular season career win percentage, but check this out.

IN THE PLAYOFFS harden has a 64% career win percentage in playoff games NOT officiated by scott foster. THAT IS INSANE. You dont think adam silver and the nba were aware of that going into game 7 in 2018. Of course they did, Harden had a 64% chance of making the finals so they sent scott foster there not just for game 7, but for game 1 as well

Could you imagine IF foster was allowed to ref a higher percentage of hardens regular season games..

Pablo going after kawhi andf the clippers is lame, while he could be breaking a huge PED scandal invoiving lebron and in an instant bring the nba worldwide coverage. This kawhi case has already been forgotten

 

Many years ago i looked into the foster vs harden/paul playoff stuff before they played that bubble game against each other where it wasn’t possible for them to both lose. I don’t remember exactly but they had around a 58% win % in the playoffs without foster and it dropped to 0% with foster. From memory it was a sample around 18 games. Based on those numbers there’s roughly a 0.000000165 probability that the 0-18 record was just random chance. That’s about 1 out of 605000. Obviously that’s not proof of it being rigged since anything is possible, it’s just a smidge unlikely.

disclaimer - i am going off memory so numbers could be off

 

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/66...nard-clippers-uncle-dennis-nba-investigation/

 

Is there proof otherwise?

 

There were 134 phone calls over a 6 month period (oct to april so the nba season) between them before tim got caught. He used his gambling phone for the calls, all calls were short. No other ref got more than a few calls from tim.

 

I know what he did.

The question was: is there any proof that any other ref did the same shady s!!t?