We have seen Angry Adam Silver before.
“The views expressed by Mr. Sterling are deeply offensive, and harmful,” Silver said on April 29, 2014. “That they came from an NBA owner only heightens the damage, and my personal outrage.”
That day, if you remember, Silver — nearly three months into his tenure as NBA commissioner — banned Donald Sterling, then the Los Angeles Clippers’ longtime governor, from the league for life, and fined him $2.5 million, the maximum amount allowed by the NBA’s constitution at the time, after the disclosure of an audio tape in which Sterling made numerous racist comments about Black people. (Even Magic Johnson got caught up in Sterling’s verbal diarrhea.) Silver also pushed the league’s owners to kick Sterling out by forcing him to sell the Clippers.
Last week in New York, we did not see Angry Adam Silver.
In discussing the Clippers and Kawhi Leonard and Steve Ballmer and Dennis Robertson and Pablo Torre following the NBA’s Board of Governors meeting Sept. 10, Silver looked like someone trying very hard to get out of a cocktail party conversation with an eminently uninteresting guest.
“I’d frankly never heard of the company Aspiration before,” Silver told reporters after the BOG meeting ended, referring to the company whose, let’s say, unusual arrangement with Leonard, is at the center of this case. “And I’d never heard a whiff of anything around an endorsement deal with Kawhi, or anything around engagement with the Los Angeles Clippers. So it was all new to me.”
Silver has walked that back some in the interim. But as the league’s investigation into the Clippers and Leonard begins, it would be wise of him to keep his cudgel and his outrage sharp.
We don’t yet have the answer to the Clippers’ version of the question that, ultimately, killed Richard Nixon’s presidency, asked by Senator Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) in June 1973 during the Watergate hearings: “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”
We don’t know how much the Clippers explicitly knew about Leonard’s $28 million deal with Aspiration — with another $20 million in company stock — which not only paid Leonard more than other celebrity endorsers for the company, like Leonardo DiCaprio; it paid Leonard more annually than he got from his shoe deal with New Balance. We don’t know if the Clippers were merely working with one of their team’s corporate partners to enhance the value of Aspiration’s brand, or if they were partners in a circumvention scheme the likes of which the NBA has never seen.
In this, former Mavericks governor Mark Cuban, who’s been Tweeting up a storm of late defending Ballmer, has a point: no one’s proved anything.
But Torre, and his “Pablo Torre Finds Out” podcast, are revealing, week after week, a lot of smoke. An awful lot of smoke. And it’s important that Silver truly understands what’s at stake as he and his league dash to the scene.
Most people around the league genuinely like Ballmer, and respect the work and resources he’s put both into league affairs, as chair of the Board’s audit committee, and in improving the Clippers’ brand since buying the team for $2 billion from Sterling’s wife, Shelley, in 2014. There’s a reason Silver went the “let’s let due process take its course” route after the BOG meeting: a lot of governors feel the same way.
But the initial impression many have of what’s been detailed so far in Torre’s podcasts, along with subsequent reporting by other outlets, including The Athletic, is not a charitable one for Ballmer or his organization. Nor will a slap on the wrist suffice if the league indeed finds definitive evidence of cap circumvention.
Everyone around the league will be watching to see if the investigation by the firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, which led the league’s investigation into the Sterling tape, will, if cap circumvention is proven, lead to severe sanctions against the NBA’s richest owner.
You may recall when the league suspended former Suns governor Robert Sarver for a year and fined him $10 million in 2022, after a 10-month investigation by Wachtell, Lipton into allegations of a toxic work environment for women and minorities in the Suns’ organization, LeBron James and Chris Paul expressed disappointment with the NBA’s discipline. If cap circumvention is found in the Clippers’ case, many of the league’s other teams want the Clippers to pay, significantly.
“Either you have a severe punishment,” a longtime NBA executive said Tuesday, “or you’re giving everyone a road map of how to do it.”
Of course, Ballmer, who strongly maintains his and his team’s innocence, deserves due process, as does anyone else. Of course, the Clippers have denied they’ve done anything wrong. Of course, the burden of proof is on the league to prove malfeasance up near Playa Vista, Calif., where the Clippers were headquartered in 2021, when all this began.
Smoking guns tend to be hard to find, though Torre’s dogged work over the last several months has unearthed quite the road map toward one.
If the NBA finds the Clippers guilty, it can’t do what it did in 2018 to the Mavericks, after a seven-month investigation that was initiated by the team, with league oversight, corroborated the findings of a Sports Illustrated story detailing a toxic work environment for women throughout the organization. The Mavs’ “punishment,” such as it was, was what the league obliquely called a $10 million “donation” that Cuban would make toward organizations “committed to supporting the leadership and development of women in the sports industry and combating domestic violence.”
Which was noble, and helpful, but did not include the word “fine” anywhere.
There was no such equivocating when Silver threw Sterling out of the league in 2014, after the disclosure of the infamous audio tape between Sterling and his mistress by the website TMZ. The tape didn’t detail any specific illegal action on Sterling’s part. Sterling didn’t break any laws with his words.
They were just … disgusting.
Yet the NBA and Wachtell, Lipton only needed three days to begin and conclude an investigation, which seemed to have exactly one question at its core:
“Donald, is this you on the tape?”
“Yes, it is.”
“No further questions.”
This took, again, all of 72 hours, from start to finish.
Of course, the comments and investigation also came during the first round of the playoffs, which included Sterling’s Clippers, who were playing the Warriors in the first round. And Silver was faced with the likelihood of a league-wide boycott of its three playoff games the night of April 29, by players on all six teams scheduled to play that evening, if he didn’t drop the hammer on Sterling. Which, he did.
The Kawhi business, of course, will take longer. There is a third party involved — Aspiration, which went bankrupt earlier this year, and whose co-founder, Joe Sanberg, agreed to plead guilty to one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in August, amid allegations that Sanberg defrauded Aspiration’s investors, including Ballmer, out of a collective $248 million. This appears to be the crux of Ballmer’s argument: I was duped like everyone else.
But Torre’s reporting unearthed an unusually united recollection from people in Aspiration’s financial department at the time the deal with Leonard was consummated: many former employees Torre spoke with believed, adamantly, that Leonard’s deal with Aspiration was a) a “no-show” arrangement, in which Leonard wouldn’t have to do any work to get the $28 million Aspiration agreed to pay him over four years, and b) clearly designed to circumvent the NBA’s cap. There are also c), the disclosure that Leonard’s deal with Aspiration would be voided if he left the Clippers, and d) evidence that Robertson, Leonard’s representative, asked for similar workarounds from other teams before Leonard signed with the Clippers in 2021.
Aspiration’s co-founder, Andrei Cherny, told The Athletic last week via e-mail that Leonard’s job was not a no-show one, though he didn’t provide specifics about Leonard’s job responsibilities or answer why there is no record of anything that Leonard did on behalf of the company. (And, other high-ranking executives in the company recall details about the arrangement with Leonard differently than Cherny does.)
Again, this will be long and complicated. Aspiration’s former C Suite does not answer to the NBA and does not have to cooperate; the NBA does not have subpoena power. Multiple people at different levels of the company will have to talk. To get the clearest picture possible, Leonard and/or Robertson will have to talk. The Clippers, of course, will have to cooperate: not just Ballmer, but any other executives who had knowledge — assuming they did — of Leonard’s arrangement with Aspiration.
“When they talk to the NBA,” the longtime NBA exec said of the Clippers’ executives, “they better come up with a better answer” than Ballmer did in his interview with ESPN last month.
Yet there is another, equally important principle at stake aside from whether Ballmer and the Clippers violated Article 13.1 of the NBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement.
In our current times, objective truth is, far too often, smashed into bits, and is rarely put back together into a coherent whole. Our ecosystem has been poisoned by misinformation, a virus injected into every aspect of our lives. Whatever it is we believe, you can rest assured that there is someone or something — a reasonably well-paid human, or an unpaid bot — doing their level best to make you doubt that what you saw or heard is actually what you saw or heard. They do this for their own, selfish reasons; I leave it to you to determine who benefits most from such an arrangement. The assault on truth is designed to destroy our notion of shared, accepted belief.
Journalism of the type Torre is providing is not designed to prove something beyond a shadow of a doubt. But journalism, good journalism, points you in a clear direction. It says, “Here is what I know now. Tomorrow, I hope to know more.”
Al Pacino, as “60 Minutes” producer Lowell Bergman in the movie “The Insider,” put the journalist’s credo into stark relief as he pressed an official for more information: “I’m getting two things: pissed off, and curious.”
Yes, the NBA’s System Arbitrator will, technically, rule on whether or not the investigation by Wachtell, Lipton proves prima facie circumvention. But it will ultimately be up to Adam Silver to decide Ballmer’s fate. If he determines Ballmer and the Clippers broke the rules, he will have to unleash afterward the resolve he displayed a decade ago, when he threw the book at Sterling based not on broken laws, but righteous anger, and didn’t look back. Because he knew what was true.
(Illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic; Photo: Kyle Grillot / Getty Images)