Semi-OT: Pablo Torre Investigation into Kawhie/Clippers

[jnrjr79]

FWIW, you could pretty plausibly make a civil claim out against Aspiration in those circumstances for tortious interference with contractual relations. Every state will have its own tortious interference caselaw and it may differ to some extent, but generally speaking, it requires:

- A valid contract between the plaintiff and a third party exists.
- The defendant has knowledge of that contract.
- The defendant has the requisite intent to induce the third party to breach the contract with the plaintiff.
- The defendant lacks justification to induce that breach.
- The breach causes damages to the plaintiff.

Sometimes "the process is the punishment" as they say, so even if the NBA didn't ultimately prevail, they might inflict some pain if they did it. Well, not now, since Aspiration is defunct, but otherwise, it could theoretically do so. And I guess I could see a universe where they might think about it, just to dissuade other companies from doing the same sort of stuff, if cap circumvention really is a cardinal sin as Silver has suggested.

Clearly down side street here, but off the cuff, I'd think:
1: Hard to say the defendant would have enough knowledge of the contract. Do you think Aspiration knows the intricacies of the CBA?
2: Hard to see the league suing individual companies over this, feels like way worse PR for them than they'd want to deal with.

So I'd say maybe this is a technical risk, but probably not a practical one.

Re: #1, "did they have enough knowledge of the contract" is, at best, something that would get sorted out at summary judgment, so that means you could subject the company to a couple years of litigation fairly easily.

Re: #2 - agreed. On the one hand, the league has an incentive to deter people from circumventing the cap. On the other, it's a dicey business practice to sue league/team sponsors.

[jnrjr79]

I think I recall reading that. You are technically right. However, in practice, the NBA isn't going to penalize a team for a player signing a marketing deal that they weren't involved with.

If the overpayment was some small amount with quid pro quo in there some how, probably not.

When the overpayment is literally 100% of the fee, and the owner is directly paying that fee to the company, so it is straight pass through, I think that's different.

We'll see what Silver decides to do of course, like I said earlier, in the end Silver reports to the 30 owners. His actions will be determined largely by what the other owners collectively want to happen. If they all have the same bodies buried somewhere else, they may want this to go away (or enough of them do), if this is a huge outlier, they may want to burn Balmer badly.

Only a small amount of this (IMO anyway) is really relevant to what fans think should happen. The league will create a narrative to explain to fans, but the outcome will be driven by what the other owners want to happen IMO.

Re: the bolded, most of the plugged-in media people seem to think it's closer to the latter than the former. The NBA owners benefit significantly from the fact that labor is cost-controlled. If it suddenly became de rigeur to be sneaking tens of millions of dollars in payments outside of their contracts to players, that's less money for the owners. Plus, it puts the smaller fish owners at a huge disadvantage to guys like Ballmer, who dgaf about the odd $50-million here and there.

[dougthonus]

Re: the bolded, most of the plugged-in media people seem to think it's closer to the latter than the former. The NBA owners benefit significantly from the fact that labor is cost-controlled. If it suddenly became de rigeur to be sneaking tens of millions of dollars in payments outside of their contracts to players, that's less money for the owners. Plus, it puts the smaller fish owners at a huge disadvantage to guys like Ballmer, who dgaf about the odd $50-million here and there.

I agree, my assumption is that most owners will want to burn Balmer.