The Clippers Denied Exactly One Thing

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Last time I argued that Kawhi Leonard is the product of this scheme rather than its architect, and that the report supports that read more than the consensus does. Start there if you missed it.

This is the other half. Not who did it, but what the punishment actually does to the people it landed on, whether the league can enforce anything, and what the Clippers are doing about it.

The trade could be done this week. Toronto and the Clippers agreed on June 30, Toronto froze it on July 9 because the league reminded them of the risk they assume with whatever happened to Kawhi, and the league resolved that on Wednesday. Shams said the same day that everything was on track and it'd be official within a couple of days¹.

So it's happening. Probably.

Here's my hesitation, and it isn't the one you'd expect. The Clippers have no leverage to renegotiate, which sounds like it makes the deal safer and actually makes it shakier. They lost five first-rounders on Wednesday. Their president of basketball operations is suspended for six months. And they're about to hand over a 35-year-old with a knee injury history in exchange for Brandon Ingram, Gradey Dick, two unprotected firsts in 2031 and 2033, a 2027 swap, and two seconds. That return was negotiated in June, when the Clippers still somehow thought they were getting exonerated. Now they're a franchise with no picks until 2034 taking a package built for a different reality. Deals get renegotiated for less, like a player failing a physical (which are we sure Toronto’s doctors are going to evaluate Kawhi and be like ‘we’re all good here!’).

Then there's the thing nobody's mentioning. The league's own statement says the firm keeps receiving information and it'll consider further action as appropriate. Toronto already paused this once specifically because the league refused to indemnify them, and the league’s investigators has now told everyone in writing that it isn't finished. If I'm Bobby Webster, I probably sign the paperwork, but I hesistate some.

But look, raise your hand if you have Kawhi suiting up for all 82 this year.

What Kawhi should do is what the July hire already suggests he's doing. Let Gaines run it. Make the separation from Dennis permanent rather than on paper. He’ll play basketball and say nothing, which is the only thing he's ever done consistently.

The ban runs five years, through 2031, when Kawhi turns 40. So functionally it's a life sentence from the only client Dennis ever had.

Notice how the league had to build it, though. Dennis isn't a player, isn't a team employee, and isn't a certified agent with the NBPA. The NBA has no jurisdiction over him whatsoever. The only way to ban a man you can't touch is to forbid everyone you can touch from talking to him. The penalty isn't really against Dennis. It's against thirty teams, on the subject of Dennis.

Which raises the question I keep coming back to: why didn't the league do something real about him in 2019?

Robertson went to the Lakers, the Raptors, and the Clippers asking for franchise equity, a house, a permanently available plane, and a guaranteed number for endorsement income. Jeanie Buss told him to his face that those things were illegal. He kept asking. You can read between the lines with how things ended in San Antonio and assume he asked these same things there too. The NBA investigated and found no evidence anyone had actually granted the requests. Note what's missing there, though. No penalty. Not for Dennis, not for anyone.

What the league did instead was write a new rule. Teams would now be required to report any solicitation of unauthorized benefits, whether it came from the player, his agent, or anybody acting on his behalf, and they'd have to report it even if they said no. Then the league ran a training session on it with every franchise. The Clippers sat through theirs on December 4, 2019. Ballmer, Zucker, Frank, all in the room. Probably with the knowledge that they already had a handshake agreement with Uncle Dennis.

You see the flaw. The entire 2019 fix assumed teams would be on the league's side against Robertson while one very likely already was working with him. It was built for a world where a team receiving improper demands wants to get rid of them. But the Clippers didn't want to get rid of them. It’s likely how they got Kawhi! Ballmer told Robertson on that April 2020 call that everyone in the building was a "collective worker" helping Kawhi hit his financial goals. Nobody ever reported this to the league. The report says the record contains no evidence the Clippers ever reported a single one of his demands.

So 2019 wasn't toothless because the league was soft. It was toothless because the league was too little, too late.

Last thing. Every other person in this story has a lawyer telling them to shut up. Ballmer is in civil litigation and a bankruptcy proceeding. Zucker was found to have lied to investigators. Kawhi has an agent issuing his statements for him. Frank has six months to sit quietly.

Dennis Robertson has no union, no contract with any team, no license to lose, and now no client. He is the only participant with absolutely nothing left to protect. And if this whole thing has taught us one thing about the man, it's that he does not like leaving money on the table.

There is no appeal. There is no arbitration. Ballmer's only avenue is a courtroom, and he's already got David Kelley of O'Melveny writing letters. The number in that letter is the part worth noting. Ballmer says he spent nearly $50 million funding the Wachtell investigation, and separately reimbursed the costs of at least six law firms, many of them hired at the demand of the league's own lawyers. He paid roughly fifty million dollars for the privilege of being fined thirty.

Court is a bad bet and his lawyers probably know it. Owners sign a constitution making the commissioner's decisions final. The salary system is collectively bargained, and the union just co-signed the outcome. And the last time an NBA team took a league dispute to federal court, the Knicks suing the Raptors in 2023², the judge sent it right back to Silver under that same constitution, rejecting the argument that the commissioner was too conflicted to hear it. That's the exact argument the Clippers would have to make, and a team has already lost it once.

The real weapon in a lawsuit isn't winning. It's discovery. The Clippers would love to put what league counsel said privately into a public record, and the league would like nothing less. Except discovery has a second edge, and it's sharper on their side. Lockton refused to cooperate with Wachtell entirely. Boingo cooperated, gave investigators information they found inconsistent or not credible, and then stopped. Both companies were beyond the league's reach the whole time. Neither is beyond a subpoena. Filing suit is the fastest available method of putting Boingo and Lockton under oath about consulting agreements that Section D suggests may have been vehicles rather than contracts. Kelley knows that too. So a suit filed for leverage and a settlement that shaves nothing off the picks and maybe something off the edges of Ballmer's year³.

Now the thing that, if I'm the league, actually keeps me up: The NBA has a very diversified business. It's trying to stand up a European league, it wants to sell expansion franchises, and it just re-upped its media deals. And it has handed a binding, unappealable punishment to a man whose personal wealth is roughly equal to the combined value of all thirty of its franchises.

Could Ballmer just start his own league? Before you laugh: every major American league has drawn a well-funded challenger lately except for the NBA. PGA and LIV. The WNBA and Unrivaled. The NFL and the UFL. None of them won and none of them really will. But they don't have to win to hurt.

There's already one under construction. Project B was founded by Grady Burnett and Geoff Prentice⁴. Landry Fields runs the men's basketball division, and Maverick Carter has been advising. It reportedly raised $5 billion. The plan is six eleven-player teams on a grand-prix-style circuit through Asia, Europe, and South America starting early next year, broadcast on YouTube, with players holding equity on top of salary. Russell Westbrook signed on this week as a co-founder and chief strategy officer with an ownership stake and a board seat. The women's division has already pulled Nneka Ogwumike, Jonquel Jones, Alyssa Thomas, and Sophie Cunningham.

These leagues move fast and the details shift constantly, so some of that will be stale here fairly soon. The point isn't assessing Project B’s viability. The point is that a serious attempt is being assembled already by people with no particular grudge, and it's finding real players. Now imagine the same thing with Ballmer's money and Ballmer's Rolodex behind it.

He wouldn’t even have to sell the Clippers. The only thing in the way is a Conflicts of Interest provision in the NBA Constitution that requires disclosure and 3/4ths approval by all governors⁷. Would he sell? I mean the rest of the league probably would make him. He paid $2 billion for the team and another $2 billion for an arena he owns outright, and could sell for a multiple of both. The whole thing is a low-single-digit percentage of what he's worth.

And here's the underlying vulnerability. The salary structure is legally shielded because the union bargained for it, which is precisely why the NBPA co-signing Wednesday's penalties matters so much. But that shield doesn't extend to everything. Arena exclusivity, broadcast arrangements, pressure on third parties not to deal with a competitor. None of that is inside the collective bargaining protection. A rival league that gets told no by buildings and networks and then walks into federal court with it is a fight the NBA has never had against someone who can outspend it⁶.

You don't have to think it would work. That's not really the metric for a man in his position. If all Ballmer accomplishes is making Adam Silver spend a year worried about the direction of his league, that's a win, and it's a cheap one for him. Retribution for the very rich doesn't have to look like victory.

The realistic path is much more boring though. He appoints an interim governor, Dennis Wong's name has been floated hilariously enough, someone from Frank's staff runs basketball ops for six months, the team rebuilds around Keaton Wagler and Brandon Ingram, and league compliance monitors sit in the building until 2031. And then there's the Zucker decision, which I'll get to.

Don't misread any of this as sympathy. Ballmer earned every word of criticism coming at him. But people keep discussing this as though the magnitude registers with him the way it would with you or me. Run his behavior through the lens of a guy in your fantasy league and you get closer to the truth⁸. He'll be annoyed he can't sit courtside for a year. Then he'll go work on a pet project or sail somewhere. He is not going to spend twelve months reeling from press coverage and plotting his next move. The nuclear option is available to him precisely because he doesn't need it.

The report calls him one of the three individuals most responsible, and that's fair. He was Robertson's primary contact, which is normally how the job works: every team’s GM takes the agent's calls. But he relayed the improper demands up to Ballmer and Zucker rather than shutting them down, and he was the one who ultimately approved the impermissible expense payments, the same payments Kawhi is now writing a $700,000 check over.

What separates him is how he handled the investigation. Investigators went out of their way to note that he discussed his conduct openly, recalled details, took responsibility for his subordinates, stayed consistent across interviews, and kept contemporaneous notes. Those notes are the only reason we know Ballmer sat on a call in April 2020 telling Dennis Robertson that everyone in the organization was a collective worker helping Kawhi hit his financial goals.

Which points at something specific about the man. The reporting rule that came out of 2019 existed because of Robertson. Frank was Robertson's primary contact for six years. The report says there's no evidence the Clippers ever filed a single report. So he wrote everything down and told no one, building a record while going along. That's not innocence. It's a different flavor of it: the guy who keeps receipts on a scheme he's participating in, so that whatever happens later, he can show you where he was standing.

It worked to his benefit, more or less. He got six months where Zucker got a year.

He almost certainly has no plans to truly walk back in the door in March. I'd assume a contract at his level has enough protection that the Clippers can't just cut him the day he's back from suspension. Although maybe Ballmer doesn't care and tells him to see me in civil court if you want your money, which would be the loudest possible signal that scorched earth is Ballmer’s plan.

Frank is a basketball lifer, unlike Zucker and unlike Ballmer, and every choice he made during this investigation was aimed at keeping the door open for another basketball job⁹. This is nowhere near the biggest thing a prominent basketball person has come back from. My guess: he serves the six months, "returns" on paper, and is helping run somebody else's front office within eighteen months.

The report's harshest language belongs to her. Primarily and directly culpable. Point person on all four deals. And the part that follows her forever: false and misleading statements to investigators. She isn't a basketball person. She's a business executive who has been Ballmer's operator since he hired her in 2014, and she got very rich doing whatever he needed done.

She did it before, too. The 2015 DeAndre Jordan sponsor arrangement, the one that earned the Clippers the prior-offender label and a $250,000 fine, was her idea too. This is the second time.

The gap between her year and Frank's six months is worth understanding, because it's the clearest thing in the document about what cooperation is worth. Investigators wrote that she made statements inconsistent with contemporaneous records, professed not to remember important events, put responsibility on subordinates, and told different versions in different sittings. Then they recommended the league weigh credibility in setting penalties. The league did.

So the question for Ballmer is loyalty against optics. Keeping her is the clearest possible signal that he rejects the findings and intends to fight, and it's also the single best way to keep compliance monitors interested in that building for the full five years.

My guess is he keeps her, in one form or another. If not with the team, then somewhere else in his portfolio, doing the same work under a different letterhead. That's what she's for.

Which raises a question the league should probably be asking itself. Dennis Robertson is a man the NBA has no authority over whatsoever, and he got five years. Gillian Zucker is a team employee the league has complete jurisdiction over, was found to be primarily and directly culpable, was found to have lied to investigators, and is a repeat participant in the same conduct and she got one year. If the league is serious about the finding it made, it's worth asking whether a one-year unpaid suspension is really the ceiling on what it can do to its own.

The word "first" in my opening sentence is doing real work. The report says investigators were still receiving information as recently as the week it came out, and the league says it will consider further action. So the league's next moves are: corroborate Section D in the report or close it, manage a lawsuit it will probably win but does not want discovery in, and keep the union on its side.

It also has a media problem. ESPN ran a Clippers-sourced story on August 17 that the league publicly called inaccurate, and two weeks later the league's own report made that story look technically defensible and only directionally wrong. Ramona Shelburne is on both ends of this¹⁰. The league just spent a news cycle calling its broadcast partner's reporting inaccurate about a story that partner had substantially right. Nobody involved wants to talk about that, which is exactly why it'll come up again.

For precedent, look at Joe Smith. In 2000 the league voided Smith's contract with Minnesota over a secret side agreement, stripped his Bird rights, fined the Wolves $3.5 million, took five first-round picks, and suspended both Glen Taylor and Kevin McHale for a year. Two of those picks came back later. Minnesota didn't recover for the better part of a decade.

Compare the ledger. The Clippers' fine is $30 million against Minnesota's $3.5 million¹¹, and they lost the same five picks with no indication any are coming back. But Joe Smith lost his contract and his Bird rights. Kawhi lost only $700,000. The league went harder on the franchise than it ever has and lighter on the player than it did twenty-six years ago.

There's a bigger trend here the league should be paying attention to. Yes, it's great having very rich people throwing money at your product and pushing franchise valuations up, and yes, those are the people you ultimately serve. But at some point you're selling the soul of this thing. Look at the recent run of legal problems: a head coach arrested by the FBI, multiple workplace misconduct matters, players and coaches caught up in gambling investigations, and now an open circumvention probe into Gary Trent Jr.'s four-year, $64 million deal with Milwaukee¹² on top of everything the Clippers just got hit with.

Some of that the league can control and some of it it can't. But the pattern is that the League’s ability to punish keeps arriving too late and landing too soft to change anyone's math beforehand. The consensus around the league is that the Clippers were uniquely egregious and that this punishment will scare everyone straight. I think the first part is probably true. I think the second part is what everybody says after every punishment¹³.

And the slowness creates its own liability. In the Trent situation, the process is thorough and therefore slow, and slow means more conduct accumulates while everyone waits.

The Clippers version is worse and that’s not being discussed enough. The investigation ran eleven months. The league presented initial findings to the team in late July. The penalties strip first-round picks from 2029 through 2033. Which means the Clippers, under active investigation for salary cap circumvention, went into the June 2026 draft and took Keaton Wagler, and they get to keep him.

At what point did the league have enough to touch a Clippers pick? Before the draft? Everything suggests yes. And if you're one of the other twenty-nine teams, that's a grievance you file away. It's also the starting point for the argument nobody wants made out loud: we have cap rules, but the enforcement record shows they only bind you after the benefit has already cleared. Even in a vacuum where the punishment is suitable, the execution of said punishment is so slow it works against it.

American sports leagues have spent a century operating with enormous legal protection. Some of it statutory, most of it flowing from collective bargaining and from courts that have historically deferred to how leagues govern themselves. That deference isn't permanent, and it erodes when enforcement starts to look decorative. Just ask the NCAA. That's a piece I want to write separately, so subscribe if you want to get alerted to that.

On the Clippers specifically, I've seen Zach Lowe say they're dead and Brian Windhorst say they'll field something roughly as good as what they had with Kawhi. It's TBD until the trade closes, but I lean towards Windhorst here. They aren't drafting another homegrown star after Wagler, and they aren't trading for a superstar anytime soon, but the bar isn't that high. A functional, competitive, forty-ish win team is very much available, at least until the penalties run out.

People keep tallying what this whole era cost and pointing out what it produced. The math runs well north of $700 million for five playoff appearances, three series wins, and one conference finals. Through the lens of NBA contracts and the cap, that's an enormous amount of money for very little.

Through the lens of Steve Ballmer, it isn't a basketball expenditure at all. It's the marketing budget for a $2 billion building. He needed the Clippers to be a destination: a team stars would sign with, sponsors would pay for, and a city would take seriously. Long enough to open the most valuable new piece of real estate in Los Angeles with an anchor tenant worth having. Against a $157 billion net worth and an arena he owns outright, $700 million to buy relevance is a customer acquisition cost¹⁴. That's the frame that explains why the financial penalty doesn't really affect him. The only real costs here are reputational and political.

My first instinct was that the June trade wouldn't go through as agreed. Frank isn't in the room. The league left the door open for more penalties. And the Clippers still seem to believe they can reverse all of this rather than recognizing they got lucky to draft Keaton Wagler in June and keep him.

The ruling flipped me.

Here's why. The Clippers' own first-round picks from 2029 through 2033 are gone. Toronto's unprotected 2031 and 2033 firsts would be the only first-round capital the Clippers control in those years. That's not a team with the standing to renegotiate. That's a team that needs this deal considerably more than the Raptors do.

Meanwhile the risk Toronto spent all summer insuring against: a voided contract, a suspended Kawhi, a season lost to discipline, evaporated on Wednesday. He got the lightest penalty on the board and is free to sign the extension, reportedly worth up to $124 million over two years. Toronto's stated reason for pausing was that the league refused to absorb that risk for them, and that risk is basically completely gone now.

Could Toronto try to squeeze a discount out of a team with no leverage? Sure. But squeezing a franchise player's former star player in the week before you ask that player to sign a nine-figure extension is a strange way to start a relationship.

Line up the two bans one more time.

Dennis Robertson is a man the NBA has no authority over whatsoever. Not a player, not an employee, not a certified agent. The league cannot fine him, cannot suspend him, cannot touch a dollar he has. The only way it could punish him at all was to forbid thirty teams from speaking to him. He got five years.

Gillian Zucker is a team employee. The league has complete jurisdiction over her. Investigators found her primarily and directly culpable, found she made false and misleading statements to them, and this is the second time she has done a version of this. The 2015 DeAndre Jordan arrangement that made the Clippers a prior offender was hers too.

She got one year.

The man they couldn't reach got five. The woman they could reach got one. Whatever the league thinks it accomplished on Wednesday, that ratio is the part worth explaining.

Photo credit: Birmingham / MediaNews Group / Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images)