LAYUPS & LIES: LA Clippers deceit about more than just basketball

This isn't really a basketball story. It's a media story, a power story, and, ultimately, a story about what happens when somebody decides that access, money, relationships or a job is more important than finding out what actually happened.

On September 2, 2026, the NBA finally released the findings of its nearly yearlong independent investigation into the Los Angeles Clippers, Kawhi Leonard and owner Steve Ballmer.

The findings were about as ugly as they could get, exposing one of the greatest frauds in modern sports history.

The NBA said the Clippers, led and directed by Ballmer, committed a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant salary-cap violations involving Leonard and four companies doing business with the team: Aspiration Partners, Boingo Wireless, Daktronics and Lockton Insurance.

The league said the Clippers helped create outside income opportunities for Leonard, facilitated endorsement agreements, induced companies to enter those agreements by offering them team business, paid personal expenses for Leonard and his representatives, and failed to report improper solicitations.

The punishment? Five first-round draft picks, one in every draft from 2029 through 2033.

Thirty million dollars in fines, along with five years of compliance monitoring. Steve Ballmer suspended from all league and team activities for a year, with other executives suspended. Dennis Robertson banned from NBA team and affiliate business for five years.

Kawhi Leonard fined $700,000, which for him should be pocket change but we all know how much professional athletes, especially those from the NBA, can barely work an abacus to jot down their ridiculous spending.

The NBA and NBPA agreed the penalties are final and binding, although the league said further information could still lead to additional action.

That may be the ending, for now, but it isn't where this story started.

It started with Pablo Torre.

On September 3, 2025, Torre reported that Leonard had a four-year, $28 million endorsement arrangement with Aspiration. He had bankruptcy documents, interviews with former employees, and plenty more questions.

So he kept digging.

Ballmer had invested $50 million in Aspiration, and the Clippers had a $300 million partnership with the company. Leonard's company was also owed millions.

Torre could find no evidence that Leonard had actually promoted Aspiration in the way you would normally expect from a $28 million endorsement arrangement. One former Aspiration employee told Torre the arrangement was there to circumvent the salary cap. In other words, all a ruse to keep attention away from under the table.

The Clippers denied it. Ballmer denied wrongdoing. Leonard denied wrongdoing. Plenty of so-called legit journalists and others with connection to money and power in the NBA all followed the money to where it kept everyone comfortable. After all this, the story could have gone away.

It didn't. Torre kept going. More companies. More documents. More reporting. More questions. All of it tinged with plenty of criticism.

Former NBA player and yet another in a long line of former jocks who think podcasting and spewing nonsense reaches a level of unconquerable intelligence, Channing Frye, asked of Torre, “why you snitching?”

Much smarter former NBA player Richard Jefferson, who obviously has a better grasp of the English language, basically answered: That's the reporter's job.

Former Dallas Mavericks owner and all-around business maverick Mark Cuban defended Ballmer and criticized Torre. In other words, keeping it all in the family and being just another part of the cover-up, either knowing full well he was spewing lies or no longer deep in the millionaires mix of knowing what the good old boys all respect.

One guess which one I and many others choose to believe.

Then Cuban eventually appeared on Torre's program, and after the NBA ruling, Cuban actually congratulated him.

Quite a ride there, Marc. Clean off the skid marks yet?

Then came the part that really bothers me as a journalist. On August 17, ESPN reported that the NBA had found no evidence Ballmer funneled money through team sponsors to Leonard. The NBA immediately said the ESPN story contained “numerous and significant inaccuracies.”

Remember now, ESPN is just another broadcast entity in financial bed with the NBA, so they have to be careful in controlling those pennies to insure everyone makes yet more gobs of cash.

Two weeks later, the NBA released the findings.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that every journalist covering the NBA knew exactly what was going on and simply refused to report it, because that's impossible to prove.

But I will ask the question everyone should be laser-focused on.

How much does access influence journalism? You see, sports reporters live in a strange world. The team controls the locker room, the interviews, the credentials, and if the team decides you are a problem, that access can disappear. Which means the journalists job may disappear because he or she no longer fills the role their employer needs from them.

I know all about it. I've lived that.

Early in my career, a professional sports team representative told me that if I continued with a story damaging to the franchise, they would pull my press credential.

I was young and didn't want to derail my career, so I shut up.

Another time, an athlete threatened legal action if I reported what I knew about an event that could have destroyed their reputation.

Again, I stayed quiet. This despite there were laws broken and other individuals potentially damaged by their actions. I didn't know what else to do.

I do now.

I refuse to lie for anyone. If the facts are there, I take the heat. That's the deal. It's what I signed up for.

That's why the Pablo Torre story hits me differently. He took the heat, kept working, continued reporting. OK, so maybe he enjoyed the attention.

Of course he did. He's in media. Publicity helps, but publicity doesn't make a story true.

Facts do. Documents do. Verification does.

Persistence matters when the people on the other side have more money, more power and far more ability to tell everyone that you're wrong.

Torre's original reporting didn't establish every fact eventually found by the NBA. That's not how journalism works. But it did something enormously important. It forced the questions into the open.

Then an independent investigation followed, and the final report found significant violations.

That's the lesson.

Controlling the narrative doesn't mean controlling reality. It means deciding whether your version of the story is built on facts or on whatever somebody powerful wants everybody else to believe.

Sometimes those two things are the same. Sometimes they're not. And when they're not, somebody has to decide whether telling the truth is worth the consequences.

That's the real story here. Not basketball, the LA Clippers, not even Pablo Torre.

It's whether journalism still has the guts to follow the facts when the facts lead somewhere uncomfortable.

Access can be lost. A job can be lost. A relationship can be lost. A contract can be lost.

Your popularity can be lost.

But if you surrender the truth to protect all of that, you've lost something else.

You've surrendered your reputation and your integrity. You've lost control of the narrative.

Which means sooner or later, somebody else is writing it for you.

Be dangerously intelligent. Control the Narrative™.