Kawhi Leonard Walks. Clippers Fans Take Steve Ballmer’s Death Penalty | Ep 1232

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
How do you want to split it?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:01)
Actually, dinner's on me.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Okay, big money.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
Well, I got a Venmo balance that I can spend with my Venmo Debit MasterCard, so.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:08)
Well, I Venmo'd you three times last week, so it's kinda on me, actually.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:12)
Yeah, you send it, I spend it.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:13)
Did my money get, like, reincarnated?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:15)
Yeah, it's chicken shawarma. You want it back?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:18)
I can't believe you, like, ate my Venmo.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:21)
Spend your balance instantly with the Venmo Debit Card. No monthly fee or minimum balance. Venmo balance, account required to get a card and use a balance. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank, NA.

**Jason Whitlock** (0:30)
Steve Ballmer deserved the death penalty, not Clippers fans. Steve Ballmer committed the felony, not Donald Sterling.
Donald Sterling lost the Clippers for words on a tape. Steve Ballmer kept the Clippers after a cap scheme the league called flagrant. This is the movie of how commissioners punish logos, spare men, and hand the funeral to the people who buy the tickets. Adam Silver sold Wednesday as Courage. Five first round picks from 2029 through 2033
A $30 million fine, a year off for Steve Ballmer, a year off without pay for Gillian Zucker, six months without pay for Lawrence Frank, and a five-year ban on Uncle Dennis Robertson, doing NBA business. Five years of league monitoring. A $700,000 bill for Kawhi Leonard, and no games missed. Those are the headlines. Those are the love taps.

**Charles** (1:38)
This is that fire. Grab your popcorn.

**Jason Whitlock** (1:42)
The men who built the circumvention walk, Aspirations $28 million side contract, the sponsor introductions with Boingo and Dactronix and Lockton. The personal expenses that never got reimbursed.
They walk into arbitration. They walk into Toronto. They walk into a year of exile from a billionaire's toy.
Clippers fans do not walk anywhere. Their franchise is dead for a decade. That is the actual sentence. Donald Sterling was a vile man and a cheap man, and the league treated his mouth as a capital crime. One tape, one set of words, lifetime ban, forced sale. The NBA discovered it could vanquish an owner when the owner embarrassed the brand in public. Speech got the building taken. The brand got a baptism. Steve Ballmer did not embarrass a dinner party. He embarrassed the salary cap. Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen and Katz found a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations by an organization the league already tagged as a prior offender. Ballmer knowingly sought to help Kawhi Leonard obtain off court income. He approved a business deal he knew was a precondition for aspiration to sign an endorsement with Leonard. He failed to create conditions under which his organization obeyed the circumvention rules. That is not a slip of the tongue in a private room. That is a scheme. And the penalty for the scheme is a sabbatical from a toy he still owns.
Well, there's before Donald Sterling and there's after Donald Sterling in the NBA.
After Sterling, the league proved it could take a franchise when the sin was speech. After Ballmer, the league proved it will not take a franchise when the sin is money.
Speech got the death penalty, the cap got a timeout, the fans got the body. This reminds me of one of my favorite documentaries. Enron, the smartest guys in the room, taught America to stare at Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and Andrew Fastow.
Mark to market accounting, shell companies, pump and dump, the camera loves the executives because executives make good villains and better copy. What the film also records and what the culture still refuses to linger on is the floor. Workers stuffed retirement into Enron stock while the C-suite cashed options. California rate payers paid for manufactured shortages while the traders laughed on tape. More than $11 billion in shareholder value gone. The men at the top always have lawyers, statements in a clean slate city. The people holding the paper do not. This is that movie in a basketball jersey and it is no longer a Clippers story. Adam Silver, Roger Goodell, Rob Manfred convert the building and build the conversion as current. They keep the suites, the statements in the arbitration clauses. The paper in your hand is the part that burns. Take a listen to Brian Windhorst.

**Brian Windhorst** (5:14)
There were doves and hawks out there in the league. There were some people who really felt like the league should come down with a crushing blow, which is what they did. There were other people who felt like a lot of the Clippers penalty with Kawhi Leonard had been doled out over time because this Kawhi Leonard arrangement was an absolute disaster for them. I will say that there was a lot of people that made a lot of assumptions about Adam Silver along the way.