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Kawhi gets released and joins the Lakers

Kawhi will be on leave during the investigation period, will then be suspended for one year, appeal, ends up with like a 15 game suspension.

My favorite part of all this is that the whole carbon offset thing is a King of the Hill plotline from years ago, right down to them (Dale and Bud Strickland) not actually planting the trees.

Ballmer has a literal army of lawyers to deal with things like this. It’ll be interesting to see if the evidence holds up.

Adam Silver will do a full investigation and punish them less than the Bogdan fiasco.

Let the spin begin

Can't believe people are still practicing the barbarism of circumvention in this day and age.

28m dollar endorsement deal with a tree planting company…sure Jan

I think Brunson got a deal with Four Seasons Landscaping.

Watched the whole Pablo thing now in depth. On circumstantial evidence he’s got Ballmer and the Clippers dead to rights.

But can the NBA lay down a heavy punishment on all three parties (Ballmer, Kawhi, Clippers) without a direct smoking gun? In the Joe Smith case they literally had the new contract drafted and signed sitting in a drawer for release a year later.

What I’d like to see are the contracts and dollar amounts for the other endorsers and what those contracts required. Pablo may not have those, otherwise he’d have produced them. Looks like he’s only going off the informants testimony. I’d feel like the smoking gun for the NBA would be if say Robert Downey, Jr was only paid $500k and had to produce three commercials for the company.

At that point you put Kawhi’s $28mm contract, which requires no work, next to Downey’s for comparison.

If you don’t want to watch the full show, Pablo does a nice six-minute summary breakdown with Dan Patrick.

?

From a year ago:

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/41984045/ex-clippers-staffer-sues-says-was-fired-kawhi-concerns

A former LA Clippers strength and conditioning coach who says he was hired in 2019 as part of a years-long campaign to recruit Kawhi Leonard has sued the team and president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank, alleging wrongful termination in part for raising concerns about the management of Leonard's health and injuries.

Shelton alleges that the Clippers' recruiting efforts were in "disregard for the NBA's prohibitions on tampering." Article 35 of the NBA's constitution prohibits teams from "directly or indirectly" attempting to entice players under contract with one team to join a different team.

Is our salvation that Doc was involved and gets the boot?

Mark Cuban really going to bat for his buddy Palmer. Going to talk with Pablo about it.

If the NBA really comes down on the Clippers it tells me at least one of a few things: the other owners must REALLY hate Ballmer, my assumption that these types of under the table payments are commonplace throughout the league is incorrect and/or they have a smoking gun akin to what they had with Joe Smith which only came to light because Smith's agent left his agency and the agency sued.

Because at this point I don't think there's a whole lot of people throughout the league who are incentivized to do the most thorough investigation possible

Lowe's pod this afternoon with Goldsberry was good and informative.

Lowe pointed this out, from the CBA:

A violation of Section 2(a) or 2(b) above may be proven by direct or circumstantial evidence, including, but not limited to, evidence that a Player Contract or any term or provision thereof cannot rationally be explained in the absence of conduct violative of Section 2(a) or 2(b).

Its hard to look at the circumstantial evidence already brought to light by Pablo's reporting and determine that they hadn't already reached that bar to hurdle.

Karalis isn’t known as an insider or reporter so I’m taking this one cautiously until corroborated. But, if true they’ve now matched Ballmer’s $50 against Kawhi’s $48.

Before all this, if you asked who the #1 guy was who wouldn't even do the bare minimum of promotion to create plausible deniability in a situation like this, it'd be Kawhi. He couldn't even be arsed to rip off a few tweets at 16m/per. He's so aloof.

Even if he was regularly promoting the company and their fraudulent scheme, you'd have a hard time explaining he's worth 20 times more than Robert Downey Jr. w/ 20 times less reach and persuasiveness. I agree it's already been proven, between this, Ballmer's investment, & the affidavits.

Do other team owners hate Ballmer? Hard to see a guy with that much money get beat in court. The league would have to have a lot of guys that don’t like him, for this to get traction, IMO. Also possible he has smoking gun dirt on other owners, and then everyone looks bad.

I guess no matter what happens to Ballmer, he’s a better Clips owner than Sterling.

I do hope they get punished severely. Seems pretty obvious they set this up and benefitted from clear cheating.