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

If this were a real court - There's absolutely enough evidence, hours and hours and hours of interviews thousands of pages of docs, affadavits.

A new one dropped just last week, I don't know if anyone noted it but far from being the unwitting dupe, Ballmer had a *previously undisclosed* secret side deal with the Aspiration CEO to be personally paid back his investment in case everything went bust (tho ultimately he didn't get paid back) unlike other investors

IMO the mountain of evidence is why all of Ballmers defenders/lickspittles pivoted to "well SMOKING GUN???" mode - smoking gun is not actually a thing. But pretend like it is and you can change the narrative.

I wish I could say I had faith in the league doing the right thing but they have spent the last 9 months preparing us for how they can break the news that they won't

 

Well... I can only be happy that it didn't work out for them.

Too many good things happening to bad people recently. Karma has been slacking on the job, or is overwhelmed by the sheer amount of schadenfreude.

 

This.

 

This is not a civil court. My guess is that Silver will need evidence above that of a civil court and below that of a criminal court, though probably closer to a criminal court.

That said, I fully expect a hammer for circumvention, fine for a minor violation without cap reduction/contract voided if NBA says can't prove circumvention, or sternly worded lecture with maybe more compliance rules if they can't even find a minor violation.

 

If salary cap circumvention were a legal matter and it was like, the SEC or FTC prosecuting (at least in the pre-Trump days where you can't automatically bribe your way out) - pretty much eveyr lawyer on earth would advise the Clippers/Ballmer/Kawhi to take a settlement or plea deal here - the evidence against them is substantial and damning in both civil and criminal terms (also those cases alo

If I recall correctly Silver issues a sanction, he has to turn this data over to some arbitrator/mediator if the Clippers choose to contest his decision here who then makes up his own standard.

 

This seems like a 'let's cancel the billionaire' witch-hunt led by the socialist class bluesky crew.

 

“…it has also looked into whether the Clippers improperly covered expenses for Leonard but were not reimbursed for them, those sources said. And the firm has examined if Leonard had a previously unreported endorsement deal with another company, those sources said.”

“Some team executives around the league have increasingly come to expect that the league will punish the Clippers.”

 

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/74...&source=user_shared_article&smid=ta-ios-share

 

[Charania] “The absolute worst case scenario that no one is expecting is Kawhi Leonard’s contract being voided, or him being suspended for a significant period of time. Whether it’s 40 or 20 games or the entire season.. It all comes down to the evidence and what’s found in the investigation.”

 

The owners need to keep Nosferatu in his coffin and away from the cameras. Just his appearance is unsettling.

 

The NBA has to publicly do something but I'm sure behind the scenes they are going to help them some way. At some point…. it may take a while but they will get a life line at some point down the line.

The NBA is a business as a whole if one of their teams hurt they will come to the aid.

 

I hate sematics sometimes.

It is obvious that the Raptors paused the trade because the NBA could still void Kawhi's contract. I speculated that the Raptors thought the NBA wouldn't void his contract if he was traded especially to the Raptors. Based on Silver's statement, I was wrong about the Raptors thinking the contract wouldn't be voided if he was traded. However, that doesn't change that the Raptors didn't want to do the trade if the NBA could still void the deal.

Occam's razor suggests the Raptors were just still operating to develop their team and agreed to the deal thinking the NBA wouldn't void the deal if he was a Raptor. For this interprestation to be true and Silver's saying that teams knew that switching teams would not affect the NBA's decision to be true, the obvious answer is that the Raptors thought when Silver said they were "close to the point now where I think we need to wrap this up" and that they wanted the Clippers to know "what the situation is they’re going to be operating under" meant that the NBA would finalize their results before the trade could be executed. In other words, the Raptors agreed to the deal expecting Kawhi's contract either to be voided so that the trade call never occurs or that Kawhi was traded without the NBA being able to void the contract, as the decision would already have been made.

The only other explanation I see is that the Raptors changed their mind, but didn't want to back out of the deal and are using Silver as an excuse.

I'm still of the opinion that the NBA is the reason that the trade didn't happen, whether it be the Raptors not thinking Kawhi would be voided, wouldn't be voided if he was a Raptor, or the Raptors thinking the NBA would not let the new NBA calendar year start without resolution.

 

No one would have Leonard sponsor anything Ballmer claiming he was ripped off, doesn’t make sense when he’s that rich.

this was clearly them circumventing the salary cap. When you combine this, with the fact that uncle Dennis and Kawai have a history of this sort of behavior, the MBA needs to come down hard on both the player and the organization themselves.

if the NBA does not correct this then, it says a dangerous president and to be honest I guess some of that probably is already going on, but it just can’t be this egregious.

I would suspend Leonard for the year. and I would take away four first rounders from the Clippers.