The Los Angeles Clippers have been handed the basketball equivalent of the death penalty.
The NBA has stripped the Los Angeles Clippers of five first-round draft picks and fined owner Steve Ballmer $30 million at the conclusion of its probe into allegations that All-Star Kawhi Leonard received impermissible benefits during his tenure with the team in violation of the league’s salary cap.
The league is also fining Leonard $700,000.
The NBA announced the decision Wednesday. The Clippers will be stripped of first-round picks in the 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032, and 2033 NBA Drafts.
The league is also suspending Ballmer “from all league and team activities for one year.” — Yahoo Sports
And that’s just the top of it. Gillian Zucker, president of business operations, suspended a year without pay — directly culpable, and she lied to investigators. Lawrence Frank, president of basketball operations, six months. Five years of league compliance monitoring. Kawhi’s uncle and former business manager Dennis Robertson barred from doing business with NBA teams on behalf of any player for five years.
Here’s what they were accused of doing. Ballmer put $50 million of his own money into a “green bank” called Aspiration in September 2021. Later that month the Clippers announced a $300 million partnership with the same company. In April 2022 — nine months after Kawhi signed a four-year, $176.3 million max deal — Aspiration signed Kawhi to a four-year, $28 million endorsement contract through his LLC, KL2 Aspire. The contract let Kawhi decline to do anything the company asked. It also voided if he left the Clippers. Aspiration went bankrupt, its co-founder is doing 14 years in federal prison, and Kawhi never publicly endorsed a thing. Pablo Torre reported it, and won a Pulitzer for it. The league’s outside law firm spent a year confirming the details. Aspiration wasn’t alone either — investigators found the same pattern with Boingo Wireless, Daktronics, and Lockton, all of them doing business with the team. The Clippers also covered personal expenses for Kawhi and his family.
“I am deeply disappointed by the flagrant violations of our rules” — Adam Silver
The team shows no signs of surrender. “We vehemently reject the NBA’s findings” — the Clippers, who called the investigation biased and built backward from a predetermined conclusion, and said what the league told them privately doesn’t match what it announced publicly.
Now compare this to last October. The FBI arrested Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and Heat guard Terry Rozier on the same morning, 34 people indicted across two cases, rigged poker games backed by the Mafia and insider prop betting on a player faking an injury. Actual crimes. Federal indictments. And what happened to Portland and Miami? Nothing. The league put two men on leave and let the franchises walk. Jontay Porter got a lifetime ban in 2024 and Toronto didn’t lose a second-round pick over it.
Gambling gets individuals in trouble, touching the salary cap gets your franchise gutted for a decade. The NBA actually does draw the line somewhere, at least there’s that.
Ballmer is the white knight who rode in to save the league from Donald Sterling. April of 2014, Sterling’s silly rabbit — her words, V. Stiviano on national television, to Barbara Walters — recorded him telling her not to bring Black people to Clippers games, Magic Johnson by name, and the tape went to TMZ. Adam Silver banned him for life, fined him the maximum $2.5 million, and moved to force a sale. Shelly Sterling had her husband declared incapacitated and sold the team to Ballmer for a then-record $2 billion. Twelve years later another scandal has rocked the team and the league.
Steve Ballmer made his fortune as a pitch-man for Windows. Not a software or engineering background, he did what the nerds can’t always do (Steve Jobs not included), he moved fucking product.
Ballmer paid $2b for a new super state of the art arena in Inglewood, and he is barred from watching his team in it for the next twelve months.
He should have placed a bid on the Angels to keep him busy in the meantime, he has the scratch lying around.
I like Steve Ballmer, he’s an absolute psychopath in a way that makes for great content and sports radio fodder. And he is obsessed with winning, something sports fans claim to want from their owners more than anything else, well that and paying for their own stadiums, which Ballmer also did.
Five first round picks being stripped away, plus California’s 13.3% tax rate, and the big brother Lakers still being the A side in town, the Clippers need a miracle to compete for a title again in the next decade.
But I guess when you put it that way, the sanctions may end up having little effect on them.
Photo: All-Pro Reels — CC BY-SA 2.0