NBA

Ball’s Clipped

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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

Disney’s Purple Kush

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The Los Angeles Lakers have agreed to be sold for the second time in ten months.

“Mark Walter … is selling it to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger for $12.5 billion.”
— CBS Sports

While most people’s initial reaction to the sale was in regard to LeBron leaving leading to a 25% increase in the value of the Lakers, or the connection to Disney’s deconstructionist woke era in Iger taking over, or the new connection the Lakers have to President Trump in Josh Kushner — the first person that came to my mind was Jay Mohr.

Mohr is a comedian I grew up enjoying that got into sports and podcasting, he hosted Jay Mohr Sports and Mohr Stories. The reason he came into my mind is that he is married to Jeanie Buss, former Lakers majority owner, who sold controlling interest to Mark Walter in June of 2025. Mohr was previously married to one of my childhood crushes, Nikki Cox, the comedy it-girl for a good chunk of the nineties. A series of plastic surgery misfortunes would in large part end her public-facing career. Mohr wrote one of the more surreal articles I’ve read during his time with Fox Sports, about being dosed with LSD at a restaurant while he was married to Nikki. The line I have never forgotten: “When you’re on acid and you’re playing Madden, your fingers are your coaches.” Then after his divorce from Nikki he ended up with Jeanie and became married into Lakers ownership. I say none of this out of envy for the man, but I have always found him funny and interesting so it’s more from a place of fraternal appreciation. He provides a human lens for me into the numbers and names of this story.  

As for Kushner, this comes less than two weeks after FIFA scrapped his attempt to buy a private equity stake in the World Cup, a plan UEFA threatened to boycott the tournament over. He’ll also have to sell his current piece of the Miami Heat before this deal can be approved.

These new sports team sale prices and valuations are often used as talking points for whatever someone’s personal ideology is. People typically see this event through whatever their worldview happens to be: corruption in the Trump Administration, the league getting more woke, Jews continuing to take over the world, billionaires being unrestrained oligarchs that are destroying society — usually people’s initial baseline worldview comes out in how these type of events are colored in their minds.

For me, I’m sure that is still true to some degree. Yet the exorbitant valuations of sports franchises today are telling for a few reasons. First, enormous increases in company valuations have taken place over the last decade, and franchise values rose right alongside them. Second, sports are one of the last bastions of attention in a hyper-fractured, niched down marketplace where it’s easier than ever for people to exist in their own bubbles. Sports still unites people across otherwise scattered interests. 

Another topic of discussion is the Lakers’ current owner, Mark Walter, who had purchased the team for $10 billion ten months ago, he makes a 25% return on that investment. Walter is the head of Guggenheim Baseball management, owners of the Dodgers since 2012, where he now turns his full attention to, aside from his reported federal investigation. So in a round about way, this one ups the Yankees’ big news of their minority share of Yankee Global to Apollo. That’s not how you make Mona Lisa smile. 

These franchises are ultimately worth whatever people are willing to pay for them. Fans should be reminded that their beloved teams are often simply someone’s investment widget to be milked for cash and flipped when the right offer comes. It may be their owner’s hobby or status symbol, or best case scenario: their passion, where they seek to show mastery of leadership, competition, and detail to put the skills that have made them titans of industry on display within the sporting world. The latter describes franchises that are actually worthy of our time and attention. Seeing fans be emotionally decimated by incompetent organizations is like seeing a brand loyalist defend a defective product. 

I understand Bob Iger does not equal Disney in this transaction, but he is still the most recognizable public figure from their executive leadership this century. Aside from Kathleen Kennedy and her brand-destroying reign as the head of Star Wars. My hope for the return of Disney to Los Angeles professional sports was always them reacquiring the Anaheim Ducks and bringing back the green and purple uniforms full time. Disney had an incredible setup with the Ducks and incorporated their IP into the live arena experience for fans. While we may not see that with the Lakers, I don’t expect to see any courtside shots of Goofy at Crypto.com arena, should they falter in the postseason, I will happily refer to them as a Mickey Mouse organization.

Photo: Erik Drost / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Womanizer

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Two former NBA players, Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, have announced they intend to identify as female to be eligible for the 2027 WNBA draft. Kanter Freedom said he and his team had carefully examined the league’s eligibility criteria and governing framework surrounding self-identification and inclusion, and that he qualifies. White followed hours later and added that his wig is in the mail.

The reason they can do this is that the WNBA has no transgender eligibility policy. None. The collective bargaining agreement signed in March says only that players who are women are eligible, and never defines the word. Into that silence stepped a parade of coaches and players — Cheryl Reeve, Stephanie White, Gabby Williams — all volunteering that a trans athlete would be welcome.

“I would welcome a trans athlete on my team or against my team, anytime. I don’t think it’s a problem in the world. It’s just another way to kind of attack trans people.”

— Gabby Williams, Golden State Valkyries

Then the players’ union issued this:

“We embrace justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Those are the values that unite this Union and allow it to protect women’s sports while creating transformational change. Hate, abuse, and demonization of any person or group of people, including transgender people, only fuel fear, division, and harm. We will continue to have hard conversations. But we will not be used as political pawns.”

— Women’s National Basketball Players Association

The WNBA is a Marxist community garden. It has always been an ideological experiment funded by the NBA, Nike, ESPN, etc. to platform their left-leaning, feminist and social and racial justice philosophy. The league is quite literally, a political pawn.

It actually serves as a wonderful microcosm of the shortcomings of these theories, as when gifted two mainstream stars on a team together in Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham, the league has sought to suppress their popularity and elevate those who fit the racial and political agenda the league exists to serve. They are not interested in making money, they feel entitled to do and say what they want, and the concept of being profitable has absolutely no bearing on their actions.

Similar to how Mamdani’s New York City is giving everyone a little free preview of the inability for Marxist ideologues to handle the primary responsibilities of the positions they hold, in Mamdani’s case that being maintaining order and carrying out basic government functions, the league shows how the abundant fallacies in the views of those running it prevent it from ever growing into a respected and commercially viable sports product. If anyone can be a woman in their worldview, then they must dispel their bigoted ways and embrace the stunning and brave Enes and Royce as champions of the very diversity and inclusion they so virtuously espouse.

Update: In response to all this, Commissioner Cathy Engelbert sent a memo to the teams that declines to define who’s eligible, noting instead that WNBA eligibility rules are collectively bargained. Translation: the league can’t settle the transgender question without the union, and the union just told you exactly where it stands.

Update 2: Hours after this post, Sophie Cunningham was clubbed in the head on a fast break layup by Chicago’s DiJonai Carrington, who was ejected on a Flagrant 2 and then posted “WHITE PRIVILEGE” from the locker room and tagged the Fever.

Yeah, this league isn’t a completely racist trainwreck or anything like that. While it’s mildly funny when it’s a women’s basketball league, this is the same rotten ideology that’s infected large swaths of government. 

Update 3: In the third quarter of that same game, Caitlin Clark was assessed her eighth technical of the season for accidentally bumping into a black female referee after being knocked out of bounds on a pass along the baseline. She simply looked at the official, turned away, and got teed up.

If your only access to the outside world was following the WNBA, you’d have a pretty strong inclination that America was on the verge of a race war.

The Indecision Concludes 

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LeBron James will join the Philadelphia 76ers on a two-year deal, the second year being a player option, for an $8m total contract value.

“The NBA’s all-time leading scorer will head back to the Eastern Conference to join the 76ers.” — NBA.com

Lebron announced on June 30th that he wouldn’t be returning to the Lakers, he did this after his son “Bronny” James $2m+ salary with the Lakers became guaranteed for next year.

I’ve never been in support of the term “nepo baby”. A deconstructionists/marxist term to guffaw at so called nepotism or privilege, when what they actually want is an inheritance tax. As far as I’m concerned, the reason people are motivated to attain great success is primarily for their children and future generations, and if they do so, they are entitled to position their heirs as they see fit. The most successful family in the world has had this multigenerational outlook for centuries and it has served them quite well, but this article isn’t about the Rothschilds. It’s about Lebron James.

LeBron held the Lakers organization hostage, giving them a de facto ultimatum to draft his wholly unqualified son, and made a mockery of the league in doing so. Bronny is so far beyond Nepo Baby it’s hard to quantify. 

LeBron milked his “decision” announcement regarding which team he will play his age 42 season with for 24 days, he got every ounce of attention he possibly could for it before signing his name on a contract. Apparently the extended free agency period even held up the Association’s 2026-2027 schedule creation. Wanting to see where LeBron landed before locking in their primetime games for the upcoming season.

Though he received considerable flack from the sports media for his indecisive antics, this summer has not been nearly the PR disaster for him that his 2010 decision to leave his hometown Cavaliers and “take his talents to South Beach” was. Prior to that epic television event my thought process was, “well he has to choose Cleveland, otherwise they’ll rake him over the coals for this.” LeBron chose Miami, won not one, not three, not four, but two championships, and the rest is history. He then went on an incredible redemptive arc and returned to The Land and brought them their first major sports championship in 52 years. LeGacy now having been restored, James dipped for Hollywood for an eight year stint that included a 2020 BLM Bubble Championship with the Los Angeles Lakers.

With this move LeBron has made himself far more relevant in the league as he fights the sunset upon his career for as long as his incredible physio regimen, TRT and stem cells (allegedly) can hold it off.

We just recently covered Futures bets and how they are the most reliable version of Power Rankings, or at least a market-driven version of them, so lets check in on what they are saying about this move:

The 76ers have climbed up to #4 with +1000 Odds , or 10/1 (up from +2000 a week ago), behind Western Conference Finalists Oklahoma City and San Antonio at a strongly favored +260, and the defending champion New York Knicks at +900.

LeBron is in his ring-chasing era, and with the emphasis sports debate shows place on championships in regard to the GOAT pantheon, it’s hard to argue with at this stage in his career. Four titles after 23 seasons, including jumping to well positioned teams in Miami, back in Cleveland, and then LA just don’t compare to Kobe’s five titles, and Jordan’s six, both of which were secured with a single franchise.

LeBron joins the newly acquired Jaylen Brown from Boston, and “The Process” Joel Embiid. They form a new big three that looks to capture the 76ers their first title since 1983.

Boston deserves a large dose of blame for fumbling the Giannis trade talks so poorly that they felt it was best to dump a franchise player to a rival to address the fallout, and in doing so creating this potential superteam destination for James.

But their loss is the other East Coast residents’ gain as Giannis and Lebron will now be playing their games in primetime in the Eastern time zone and remix the league with new rivalries, compelling matchups, and a whole host of new and lofty expectations for LeBron and the Sixers to live up to.

While I’ll take satisfaction in the mumbled excuses LeBron gives in his postseason press conference should Philly come up short in their quest for a title, this gives me something I haven’t had for a few years in regard to the NBA regular season, a reason to watch.

Now that his decision is made, he can spend some time this summer finally watching The Godfather and reading Malcolm X!