If you were doing something illegal, Kawhi Leonard would be a great front man. He is very experienced with scrutiny, having won two NBA championships and as many NBA Finals MVPs. While doing this he has managed to remain unfazed, at least in appearance, keeping a very low profile, as far as these things go. He is hardly a household name. Unless you’re a basketball nerd, Leonard probably has no aura in your heart. His humanity is rarely conspicuous. He’s taken daily questions from the media for over a decade and never looked agitated, concerned, or even emotive in any way. He implicitly pleads the fifth amendment, in how he is, saying as little as possible. A pure brick wall of anti-charisma, this is not the kind of guy you want to be deposing in discovery.
Perhaps it will be Leonard’s stolid intransigence that saves his team from the fresh pressure of scandal. In a new, highly detailed report by Pablo Torre, the Los Angeles Clippers have been accused of circumventing the league’s strict salary cap rules. They did this, supposedly, to pay Leonard an extra $28 million, giving them a distinct advantage over other franchises vying for the privilege of his talents. The alleged methods involve a shell company, purporting to offset human activity’s heating of the globe with tree plantings robust enough to balance the carbon scales.
As tends to be the case, the people with private jets were not really doing good by the earth, like they said they were. The Lorax was really The Once-ler. Giving that amount of money to Leonard—who’s set to earn nearly half a billion dollars, on the books, in his career—is not in any way positive for overall air quality. One of the primary schemers of this plan to move money around nefariously, behind a flimsy Captain Planet shield, is mega-investor Joe Sanberg, who recently pleaded guilty to wire fraud. It was Torre’s report that made much of the public aware of who Sanberg is, and connected the plot to Leonard and the Clippers. Since his bombshell podcast dropped, Torre has already had one follow-up episode, based on all the new information given to him upon the first one’s release, and more reporting is sure to come.
An investigation by the NBA is due, too, and we should be curious about exactly what the goals of that exercise will be. Adam Silver is the NBA’s commissioner, and it will be his selection and direction of third-party investigators that sets the tone for how the Clippers will be looked at. But there is a perpetual question about Silver, which is also a question about any major sports league commissioner: does he manage the team owners, or do they manage him? That question can’t quite be answered, and even if it could, it wouldn’t necessarily tell us what might happen here.
That’s because some teams might be out for blood, angry that L.A. used owner Steve Ballmer’s endless pockets to skirt the rules—but they might only be angry right now, before they realize the implications of pursuing too broad of a penalty. Leonard’s $28 million are, through one lens, just an extra-big version of what many, maybe all, NBA teams do. It is standard practice, for better or worse, for teams to facilitate business between star players and sponsors, whether they’re sprawling and dubious environmental activism organizations or simply local businesses; we’ve all heard jokes about unambitious veteran players staying in one market so that they can open more car dealerships and restaurants there, setting up a cozier post-playing existence.
Leonard’s arrangement, should it be proven as an explicitly Clippers-led coordination, is obviously a more flagrant and illegal method of player enrichment than those traditions. Let’s be clear, though: there is a big difference between U.S. law and the NBA’s rules for how its teams can and can’t do business. The latter system is somewhat fictional, compared to the former. It is a pretext for fairness and balance, often flouted in small ways. It has some overlap with the bigger, more concrete legal system, but only some. And the invention and enforcement of NBA legality is much more art than science.
So there is a lot to consider here. Likely more than anyone has publicly said. Those who have followed the increasingly complex evolution of the NCAA since the bigger (real) legal system broke apart their previous (non)payment system can tell you that the can of worms goes deeper than you might think. Since the NCAA can was opened, the worms have never stopped flowing, and who knows how the big mess of transfer portals, celebrification, and sponsorship mania of collegiate sports will look even a year from now?
The NBA, like the NCAA, is a big old money machine with all kinds of runoffs and moving parts that are not plainly visible to its fans. Some might be enraged to see them, and others might not care at all. Silver and the owners have to decide what matters to them with the public, and square that with the competitive instincts of teams trembling with hurt feelings over these new suspicions. The merits of forthcoming evidence are still mysterious, but we may soon see just how much the NBA’s rules are about P.R. and billionaire mollification as opposed to actual justice.