The relationship between the Los Angeles Clippers, the dubious carbon-credit company Aspiration, and Kawhi Leonard sure looks like salary cap circumvention, as journalist Pablo Torre has convincingly laid out on his podcast. Clippers owner Steve Ballmer had personally invested $50 million in Aspiration; Leonard was later offered a $28 million sponsorship by Aspiration that required virtually nothing of him, and he indeed did nothing to promote the company. The only real stipulation in the contract was that Leonard needed to remain on the Clippers to receive those payouts. A follow-up report from the Boston Sports Journal claims that Leonard also had a side deal with Aspiration that paid him an additional $20 million in company stock. In an interview Thursday with ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne, Ballmer was given a chance to publicly defend his team from accusations of cheating the salary cap.
His defense, unconvincing as it is, had two themes. First, that he didn’t do any due diligence in evaluating a company that his personal LLC invested $50 million in. “I reviewed—my staff reviewed—primarily fraudulent financials,” he said to Shelburne. “I feel embarrassed and kind of silly that I didn’t sniff it out.” And second, that the timeline of events ruled out any possible malfeasance.
In August 2021, the Clippers signed Leonard to a four-year, $176 million extension, which was the maximum amount that they could have paid him. In September 2021, the Clippers announced a partnership with Aspiration that included jersey patches and arena sponsorship. And, as Ballmer claimed in the interview, they only introduced Leonard to Aspiration in November 2021, after both of the above deals were already “locked and loaded.” Ballmer claimed no knowledge of the deal signed between Leonard and Aspiration.
In the course of cooperating with Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Committee investigations into Aspiration, Ballmer said, the Clippers reviewed the documentation of all their interactions with Aspiration. They had nothing linking Leonard to Aspiration until that introduction was made in November 2021—after Leonard’s contract was already signed. “Where could any of this circumvention have happened? It didn’t,” Ballmer said. It doesn’t require a terribly powerful imagination to think that unwritten conversations could have taken place before that August.
The NBA is conducting its own investigation, according to league spokesman Mike Bass, and presumably it will dig deeper into the timeline of that summer. As Tom Haberstroh explored at Yahoo! Sports, the punishments outlined in the CBA for such cap hijinks are surprisingly mild, and clawing back money might get trickier still because Leonard has already moved onto a new contract after the one in question. Ballmer said in the interview that he was “mad and sad” that Clippers staff and fans had to go through this scandal, but if the team is found guilty of cheating the cap and the only penalty is a potpourri of minor penalties, he might not get much madder or sadder.
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