NBA Penalizes Clippers and Steve Ballmer in Salary Cap Scandal
The NBA harshly penalized the Los Angeles Clippers, owner Steve Ballmer, and Kawhi Leonard for breaking salary cap regulations in Leonard's latest contract.
Video Transcript
Well, the breaking story over the last half hour or so is the NBA dropping the hammer on the Los Angeles Clippers, as well as their owner, Steve Ballmer, and Kawhi Leonard for doing everything in their power of circumventing the salary cap by inventing companies to pay Kawhi Leonard off the books, so to speak, so, so they could stay under that salary cap.
And we're talking a ton, and I mean a ton, of draft capital with what they're doing here.
But keep this in mind.
In addition to the ridiculous amount of draft picks that they're not gonna be able to get here, Craig, keep in mind that their '21, '20, '22, '23, '24, '25, 2, '26, '29, '30, '31, '32 and '33, 2033 draft picks, yeah, they gave those away to acquire Kawhi Leonard and Paul George.
So in addition to all of those picks they no longer have, they also don't have SGA, which of course they traded away.
They basically gave up 11 picks for three total playoff series victories during their time, and now they're not gonna be able to get any draft picks again for the next five years.
You wanna talk about debilitating and destroying a franchise, that's exactly what the NBA did without basically booting him out of the league, Craig.
And in epic Kawhi fashion, talking about integrity and respect for the game, and that he entered into the contract, with, you know, in good faith.
But he's basically saying, "I take responsibility for my uncle being the agent and cutting this deal, a- and it's my fault for the people on my inner cir- " No personal responsibility like he had any idea this was going on.
But he blames himself for the fact that he let his uncle be his manager from day one in the NBA.
It's a little strange to me.
The whole, the whole story is one of the more strange things that I have seen.
I mean, I have, have, you know, sort of watched this from the beginning.
And as somebody that, you know, certainly is, is a journalist and has done this for a really long time, especially with Major League Baseball, you know, when the, when this story first came out with Pablo Torre who was, who was, reporting on this, I got to admit, I was very skeptical of this whole story.
Because I thought to myself, h- how is out of nowhere this story, uh- Yes so, you know, so well reported and, and no one is talking about it, and nothing is happening?
And then the, you know, this took such a long time for anything to happen, and then I thought maybe my skepticism was accurate, that, you know, I, I mean, maybe this was really not a story.
And then, the NBA comes out and says it's not a story.
And I thought to myself, wait a second here.
We spent a lot of time wasting time discu- discussing some potential improprieties about an owner in the NBA.
I think we were too tough on the owner in the NBA, Steve Ballmer.
I thought, I think we were.
Mm-hmm.
And then a week later, the Clippers are giving up five first-round picks?
What happened to that story a week ago?
I don't, I don't- Yeah understand this one at all.
Now, now I, I am going to guess.
Now, look, I, sometimes I'm wrong about stuff.
Like for example, when Luka got traded, I tho- You know what I said, Joe?
I said that, Dallas is gonna win the trade because there's probably something we don't know about Luka.
That's, honestly, that's how dumb the trade looked.
I was like, wait a second, this, we- Yep we gotta, there's, there's something that we don't know about Luka that's gonna come out.
It ended up costing the career of the guy on the, the GM of the Ma- Mavericks, whatever his name is.
Harrison, I think his name is.
He's gone.
He's not gonna ever be a GM again.
Yep.
And so in this particular Right.
Thanks.
And so in this case, I was thinking the same thing, like, th- this can't be true.
It- it's just so weird that the story's being reported and nothing is being said about it.
So that's why my take on this, Joe, is as follows: I gotta believe that something happened in the last week.
I know it sounds crazy.
And I'll be wrong, and I'll be back on the air, and I'll be wrong tomorrow.
I bet you, my prediction is by tomorrow when we're on the air, we're gonna hear Adam Silver say that we found something over the past seven days that changed our mind.
It has to be.
Because how is it possible that the investigation proved nothing less than 10 days ago, and now all of a sudden the Clippers are being, you know, mauled like SMU was back in the day in college football?
Like, they're, like, it's like they got the death penalty it feels like.
It's a lot.
It's a lot.
and Kawhi Leonard's forced to give back- Yeah 700 grand, which is not much.
So Joe, I'm gonna be wrong, and I'll take my L tomorrow on the show when Adam Silver just comes out and does a regular, you know, you know, u- upon further review, blah, blah.
I gotta believe there's- Right some smoking gun that came out recently, because it makes no sense whatsoever what has happened in the last two weeks.
Nothing.
Well, it, it also feels like, Craig, like this is more, you know, performance-based than anything else.
'Cause they, you can't tell me for a year they didn't know this.
They knew this, right?
So why now?
But also, let's really look at the punishment here.
You have a billionaire owner who you're saying can't hang out with the team now, and you're gonna slap with a $30 million- That doesn't matter fine, which he has- That doesn't matter in a couch cushion.
That doesn't matter.
None of this matters.
No.
That's my problem.
No, the picks matter.
This whole thing- No, the picks, the picks, that's a lot so- No?
So they had already, they already crippled their franchise getting Paul George and Kawhi to begin with.
So this to me is all performance-based.
