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The NBA Just Kneecapped the Clippers

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The NBA just issued the most severe penalty ever imposed on a franchise for salary-cap circumvention, a gross violation of the collective bargaining agreement. The Los Angeles Clippers will be hobbled for years after forfeiting first-round picks in multiple drafts, paying a $30 million fine, and having most of its front office, including its owner, sent to the gulag for at least a year. The controversy centers on Kawhi Leonard, who has now been traded to the Toronto Raptors, following the conclusion of this investigation, which took over a year. 

It’s a circus. Owner Steve Ballmer is apparently incensed over the penalties, with the franchise forcefully denying the report’s findings. The problem is, this has happened before: the Clippers were fined for salary cap manipulation, though it wasn’t a $30 million fine. 

ESPN’s Brian Windhorst said that while the report lacks a “smoking gun,” the preponderance of evidence is damning — enough to likely lead to a conviction if this were up to a jury. It’s that bad. Some of the findings are blatant violations of the cap rules. As for Leonard, he was fined $700,000 for his role, though he claims he was unaware of the Clippers’ front-office schemes. He said this as he boarded a plane to Toronto. 

The Raptors were keeping their trade of Leonard, who won them an NBA championship in 2019, on hold until the conclusion of this investigation. Leonard’s uncle, Dennis Robertson, who serves as a business adviser and family ambassador to his nephew, has been barred from engaging with any NBA teams for the next five years. So, how did this scheme work? Well, it started with a $28 million no-show promotion contract with Aspiration, a green energy financial technology company that has since folded. 

Mr. Ballmer was given a one-year suspension from the league, whereas Clippers president Lawrence Frank and president of business operations Gillian Zucker were slapped with a six-month and one-year suspension, respectively. 

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The Athletic had a lengthy piece about this operation:

The announcement marks the end of a lengthy investigation. What began as an inquiry into whether the Clippers circumvented the NBA’s salary-cap rules through Leonard’s endorsement deal with Aspiration expanded over time.

The investigation stemmed from a Sept. 3, 2025 “Pablo Torre Finds Out” podcast episode reporting that Leonard accepted a $28 million no-show contract with Aspiration, the California environmental company that also served as the team’s jersey-patch partner until the end of the 2022-23 season.

The NBA examined whether that contract was an attempt by the Clippers to pay him beyond the salary he earned from the team and more than he could make under the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement — a method of salary cap circumvention in violation of the league’s rules.

Aspiration had gone into bankruptcy in March 2025, listing Leonard among its leading creditors alongside the Clippers. According to legal documents filed in court by Aspiration, Leonard was owed $7 million through his limited liability company KL2 Aspire, LLC.

The NBA hired Wachtell to investigate the allegation days after the podcast first aired. The firm has run several significant investigations for the league, and the Clippers became the latest, and perhaps its most high-profile, since Wachtell looked into former Clippers owner Donald Sterling in 2014.

The findings:

  • Shortly after Leonard signed with the Clippers in July 2019, Robertson told Ballmer and top team officials that he expected about $10 million in off-court income for Leonard and pressured them during the ensuing year to make good on it. In April 2020, Robertson asked for a 3-6 month timeline, and Clippers officials assured him they would live up to that demand, according to notes written by Frank at the time.
  • In June 2020, Zucker introduced Robertson by email to executives at Daktronics, Boingo and Lockton Companies. Within a month of those introductions, Leonard signed multimillion-dollar deals with two of the companies on the same day. The next month, he signed another, the NBA’s report said, and was paid $18 million by the companies within a year. Zucker, investigators said, leveraged personal relationships at two of the companies; her husband was the chair of the board of directors at one.
  • The deals with Daktronics, Boingo and Lockton Companies 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 agreed to a deal of that magnitude — and have not since. The endorsement deals also asked little of Leonard and were not publicly announced. The only time Leonard did an endorsement activation for any of the three companies, NBA investigators found, was a visit to a military base and signing some memorabilia.
  • Boingo, Daktronics and Lockton each signed consulting deals with the Clippers soon after Zucker emailed them about Leonard. Two of them received $10 million payments before signing Leonard, and the other received $2 million after its first payment to him.
  • In addition to an endorsement deal with Aspiration, Leonard also received $20 million in equity from Joe Sanberg, the company’s co-founder, who pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges last fall.
  • The deal between the company and Leonard was facilitated and managed by Zucker. She connected Aspiration and Leonard’s representatives, helped with negotiations and was told by Sanberg that the company would not sign the deal unless the Clippers also brought business back to Aspiration.
  • Aspiration ultimately signed a contract to offer sustainability services for The Forum, another venue owned by Ballmer. The deal did not specify any sustainability terms but said the Clippers would spend $7 million to match what Aspiration paid Leonard annually.
  • When Sanberg threatened to blow up the endorsement deal with Leonard unless the contract for the Forum was signed, he emailed Clippers executives to make it clear that the two contracts were linked. Ultimately, Ballmer signed off on the Forum deal, and the explicit relationship between the two contracts was a violation of the NBA’s cap circumvention rules.

Leonard gets to play ball with his former team, while the Clippers have been kneecapped. 

One thing the article noted was that it might have seemed unusual for Aspiration to choose Leonard as their main promotional figure. He’s quiet, has no social media presence, and is highly protective of his family and personal life. The contract also gave him outs on promotional events. This arrangement, coupled with a company whose demise feeds the narrative that green energy is a money pit, seemed primed for a blowup. 

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