If the Player Empowerment Era of the NBA is, by most accounts, at an end, Adam Silver went in the other direction Wednesday. He looked upon the richest owner in his league by a factor of 3 or 4x, depending on whose financial listings you believe, and threw the book at him and his team. No slap on the wrist for Steve Ballmer. No compromise for his front office. No levity for the Los Angeles Clippers.
Wachtell Lipton, the law firm charged by the NBA to investigate allegations that the Clippers circumvented the salary cap in off-court deals with Kawhi Leonard, issued its long-awaited findings in a detailed report Wednesday, almost a year to the day that it began the inquiry.
Silver’s justice was comprehensive.
He suspended the team’s governor, Steve Ballmer, from all team activities for a year, took consecutive first-round picks from the team between 2029 and 2033, and fined the Clippers $30 million for what the league determined was four separate side deals between Leonard and companies doing business with the team — Aspiration, Boingo, Daktronics and Lockton Insurance — that the NBA believed circumvented its salary cap. He suspended the Clippers’ longtime president of business operations, Gillian Zucker, for a year without pay, “for being primarily and directly culpable for the impermissible endorsement arrangements and for providing false and misleading statements to investigators,” the league said in a statement Wednesday.
And Silver suspended Clippers president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank for six months, “for his involvement with the impermissible endorsement arrangements and for approving impermissible expenses incurred by Mr. Leonard and his family.”
It was as powerful a rebuke of an owner and team as a commissioner in any sport has done, really, since the last time Silver acted so decisively. His first major decision as commissioner came in 2014, when he banned then-Clippers owner Donald Sterling from the league for life. (That it was the Clippers again was a dark coincidence; Sterling is in his own, awful, category.)
It was a move, and this is not said lightly, that David Stern would have done, without blinking, if he believed the evidence laid at his desk.
Silver believed the evidence. He did not blink.
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I did not believe he would do so.
Silver is a very different person than Stern. The latter did not seek consensus, whether from players or ownership. He was famous for threatening anyone who, he believed, was bringing shame or bad dealings to what he called “my league.” He railed at Board of Governors meetings, frequently cursing out the very people for whom he worked if he thought they were not doing their part to help the league’s business. He blustered, bullied and browbeat people into doing what he wanted.
Silver looks for common ground. It’s not that he avoids confrontation, but he doesn’t go about solving the league’s problems with threats of retribution. He talks about the NBA’s major constituencies as partners. It’s not the MO of someone who was as pointed in his remarks as he was Wednesday, in his only public statement on the matter.
“The NBA’s collectively bargained system for determining player compensation is a fundamental component of the basketball competition that the league oversees for the benefit of the teams and players and ultimately the fans,” Silver said in the statement. “I am deeply disappointed by the flagrant violations of our rules and by the Clippers’ institutional and leadership failures that led to this misconduct. The severity of the penalties reflects the seriousness of the violations.”
The entire league has been waiting for the last year to see if Ballmer’s wealth and the respect he’s gleaned from his fellow owners over the last decade-plus for his stewardship of what had been one of the league’s worst franchises would inculcate him. There was no smoking gun, of course; there were just pointed assertions, first brought to light by the podcast “Pablo Torre Finds Out” last September, initially about a $28 million endorsement deal between Leonard and Aspiration, the digital financial services and climate technology company.
(By the way: A lot of people, over the last year, including former Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, said there was no there there in Torre’s series of reports, that all of this was easily explained away, and that the Clippers hadn’t done anything wrong. Wachtell Lipton came to a different conclusion. So did the Pulitzer organization. I think Torre and his group are pretty well vindicated, no matter how this ends.)
The calculus of other teams was simple. If the Clippers were found to have circumvented the cap, Silver had to hit them hard. Fines wouldn’t much matter to the 15th-richest man on earth, but $30 million — the league asserts that the Clippers helped arrange what became four separate cap circumventions, quadrupling the $7.5 million fine limit for a single violation — was significant. Still, the draft pick drain was the only way, many around the league felt, to send an appropriate message.
Ballmer is eminently respected by his brethren, both for his voice and his business savvy. If the Clippers haven’t won a title, they’ve been a consistent winner during his tenure. He is the longtime chair of the NBA Board of Governors’ Audit Committee. And, you can’t say that Ballmer hasn’t spent, lavishly, on his franchise. He set a then-NBA record by buying the team for $2 billion in 2014, then spent another $2 billion of his own money, with no public investment, to build Intuit Dome, which opened in 2024. His franchise just paid more than $6 million in luxury taxes this past season.
That Ballmer’s fellow owners like and respect him, though, did not keep them from wanting the Clippers to be punished, and severely, if the accusations proved true. The league has pushed the notion of competitive balance to the hilt in the last few years. Central to that notion is the cap, and its various mechanisms, designed to keep teams from wild differentials in roster spending, like there is in Major League Baseball.
“Either you have a severe punishment,” a longtime NBA executive said as the investigation began last year, “or you’re giving everyone a road map of how to do it.”
Recidivism played a significant role in the punishment as well. The Clippers were fined $250,000 in 2015 after the league determined the team improperly discussed a potential third-party endorsement deal for DeAndre Jordan during a presentation to the center, who was a free agent that summer. Then, Ballmer said the team “believed we were doing this the right way, and any circumvention was inadvertent. In our effort to support our players in every way possible, we as an organization must be diligent in complying with the CBA.”
The Clippers maintained their innocence in the Leonard case Wednesday, too. In a statement, they said they “vehemently reject the NBA’s findings, which are the result of a heavily biased investigation seeking to justify a predetermined narrative rather than facts and evidence. What the league told us privately differs from what it announced today publicly, and they have not held themselves close to the standard Commissioner Silver set at the start of this investigation to ensure it’s (sic) fairness and accuracy.”
Though the league banned Leonard’s uncle and former business manager, Dennis Robertson, from doing business with teams on behalf of any player for five years, Silver fined Leonard $700,000 individually. And it does not appear the league will get in the way of the trade announced in July that will send Leonard to the Toronto Raptors for Brandon Ingram, Gradey Dick, unprotected firsts in 2031 and 2033, a 2027 first-round pick swap and second-rounders in 2030 and 2033. In this, the NBA seemed to take its wins where it could.
By getting the National Basketball Players Association to sign off on its punishments, including the fine to Leonard, and not going after his current contract, the NBA avoided potential arbitration that the union would have immediately sought to restore Leonard’s deal, or reduce any suspensions issued. This occurred in 1998, when a system arbitrator ruled in favor of Latrell Sprewell, the then-Warriors guard who had had his contract terminated by the team, along with a concurrent year-long suspension issued by Stern, after Sprewell had choked then-Golden State coach P.J. Carlesimo during an altercation during practice. The arbitrator restored the last two years of Sprewell’s contract and reduced his suspension by five months.
I never believed the league could void Leonard’s contract, as some have suggested it could do. His player contract was never at issue. The Clippers and Leonard agreed on a three-year, $152 million extension in 2024, which didn’t violate any rules. The alleged violation was circumventing the cap to give Leonard additional money. If the NBA had voided the remaining year of Leonard’s deal, it would then have to fight a two-front war, taking on both the union and the Clippers in separate litigation.
The Clippers, though, seem to be lining up their legal ducks.
The team released a letter Wednesday to Silver from attorney David N. Kelley, from the firm O’Melveny & Myers, stating that Ballmer’s reputation “has been irreparably damaged as he now finds himself embroiled not only in this heavily biased investigation, but in civil litigation, the Aspiration bankruptcy proceeding, and more. It seems increasingly likely that Mr. Ballmer will spend years defending himself and the team against a podcaster’s baseless claims. We have already detailed for Wachtell our concerns about the ways in which this process was designed to substantiate a predetermined outcome.”
And Kelley is no joke. He is a serious lawyer, respected by other serious lawyers. He was the interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He was co-chair of the Justice Department’s investigation into the 9/11 attacks in 2001. If the Clippers have any legal leg to stand on going forward, be assured he’ll find it.
But what is their argument? Wachtell Lipton didn’t issue the sanctions; Silver did. And Silver, according to the NBA’s constitution and bylaws, has significant latitude to impose discipline.
Article 24 of the league’s constitution, “Authority and Duties of the Commissioner,” includes this: “The Commissioner shall have the power to suspend a Player, Coach, Member, Owner, or other person subject to the Commissioner’s jurisdiction for a definite or indefinite period and to impose such fines and other penalties as are authorized by Article 35, 35A or any other Article or Section relating thereto of this Constitution and By-Laws. The Commissioner shall have the power to declare null and void any Player transaction made by and between Members of the Association or by and between Members of the Association and any organization outside of the Association.”
And does Ballmer really want his organization to go to discovery in a courtroom? Owners don’t like depositions. Wachtell Lipton’s report detailed numerous contacts between the team and the companies that had not previously come to light, in advance of subsequent e-mails that the team claims provided the initial contacts between Leonard and the companies. Frank, according to the report, “openly discussed with investigators his conduct from the relevant time period, recalled details of key events, took responsibility for the actions of subordinates, and was generally consistent across his interviews,” as well as providing contemporaneous notes of meetings.
Over the last few years, multiple NBA teams have been gobbled up by incredibly wealthy individuals and groups, many well beyond “just” billionaire status. But Ballmer is richer than all of them.
But a law firm said, clearly, that his team broke the rules. And Adam Silver, himself trained at law, acted — unequivocally and decisively. He was his predecessor’s equal, and then some, in the moment.