Well, how about that.
For reasons both justified and misguided, NBA commissioner Adam Silver has been under fire for some time now. So people were happy to spend the last year criticizing him for something that hadn’t happened yet.
Pundits and fans alike concluded that the length of the NBA’s investigation, the way that several reports from ESPN1 and others have framed this whole Aspiration thing as unlikely to be punished, and the timidity of Silver’s own words ("I would be reluctant to act if there was sort of a mere appearance of impropriety…”) assured a slap on the wrist at best.
Where’s David Stern when you need him? cried the masses. The Atlantic even wrote a whole article about how Silver’s aversion to conflict would doom him, a story that bordered on being a hit piece.
The famously harsh Stern sure would be proud of his protégé right now.
I had maintained a cautious optimism throughout this process that Silver would do more than rap some knuckles. The Olympus Mons-sized mountain of circumstantial evidence, including the complete inability of the Clippers to explain why multiple corporations would willingly pay Kawhi Leonard millions and millions of dollars to do almost literally nothing, beggars the belief that this was anything upfront and ethical.
The NBA’s freshly-dropped official report is explosive. I don’t know the legal definition of a “smoking gun,” but there sure are a lot of red-eyed pistols listening to Grateful Dead albums on repeat around here.
We won’t rehash all of the details, every little thing that doesn’t add up. The Athletic’s Mike Vorkunov, who has done a tremendous job reporting on this throughout the process, summarized it best:
Those deals, Wachtell Lipton lawyers said, stood out because they were signed at a time when sponsorship agreements had slowed across the industry in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and were signed by companies that had never signed a deal of that magnitude — and have not since. The endorsement deals also asked little of Leonard and were not publicly announced…
The league’s report, which is chock-full of interesting and damning evidence2, indicated that witnesses at every company were questioned about these basic facts, and none of them had a satisfactory exculpatory answer. No one has yet come up with an excuse that doesn’t stink like last week’s salmon for even a single case, much less all four. Add in the numerous suspiciously timed and conspicuously valued payments from Ballmer and his partners to these corporations, and it’s all as clear as a sunny Laguna Beach afternoon.
To add a sh*t cherry to the top of the Clippers’ diarrhea sundae, the SEC (and we ain’t talking college football) is reportedly investigating Daktronics now for the peculiar financial engineering around this Leonard situation. This could become a bigger problem for all parties involved.