Strong Kawhi & Clippers Takes, Plus Eastern Conference Over/Unders | Good Take

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The NBA laid the hammer on the Clippers over the Kawhi investigation. Plus, we've got our Eastern Conference over-unders all coming up next. It's Good Take.
Wes Goldberg here with Mike Shearer. You know him from the basketball poetry newsletter and from this very fine podcast, Good Take. We are back, Mike, after a summer roundtable month where you, me, Mo and Jared were talking through some big-picture NBA concepts. We're back with some regularly scheduled programming, Good Take, every Thursday. But the part that's not regular about this is we are breaking free of our Good Take format or you and I exchange takes and then the listeners vote on the best take and then that winner gets the and won. We're not going to do that today because we have too much to get to.
Frankly, we probably won't get to that for the next couple of weeks. You and I were planning to do our Eastern Conference win total over-unders and make our picks for that. You and I have prepared that. We are going to do that today. But we have to talk about the Kawhi Leonard News, the Clippers News, the Steve Ballmer News, the Adam Silver News, whatever we want to call it. We have to talk about it. But there has been so many podcasts about this already. It is 9:38 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday. This came out around what time did this all get announced? It was 5, 6, yeah, 4 o'clock something on Wednesday. So Moe, DeKeele and Jared Dubin already hopped onto the Double Dribble part of the RealGM Radio podcast feed and YouTube channel. They went thorough into the findings, what happened and all of that. So I do encourage people to listen to that. There's been a bunch of things written about it. We don't need to be that thorough. Enough people have done that. But we're gonna go back to our Good Take roots here. You and I have a take, one each, on this whole Clippers Kawhi Leonard situation. So that's what we're gonna do. But just a real quick little summary here for people that may have missed it somehow. The NBA, after nearly a year long investigation, did quote, according to their statement, found a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations by the Clippers organization, a prior offender of the salary cap circumvention rules the Clippers have to forfeit five first round picks between 2029 and 2033
Steve Ballmer is being fined $30 million and he is banned from, suspended from all league and team activities for one year. There's a couple of other front office folks who have also been suspended for various amounts of time. Kawhi Leonard is not suspended, but he will have to pay the league a mere $700,000 for his part in all of this. And it does sound like the trade to the Toronto Raptors is gonna end up going through here. So hit me with your good take, Mike.

**Mike Shearer** (4:08)
I just feel like the Clippers really missed a major opportunity here to mitigate all the damage that they have now sustained.
We sat on this podcast a few months ago and said, here are the things that the Clippers can do this summer to fix their team. And one of my recommendations was you don't have to admit wrongdoing, but go to the league and be like, hey, we misinterpreted the CBA. We think we may have made a mistake. We know you're investigating us. We know we're guilty. We know you know we're guilty, but we will voluntarily forfeit a couple of first round picks. Like the NCAA teams do this all the time. They self-report recruiting violations in hopes of heading off a bigger punishment they voluntarily take on a smaller one. And I think the hubris by the Clippers to be like, hey, we're guilty. We know you know you're guilty, but you're not going to do shit about it, are you? I think that's what really was the final nail in their coffin. They dared Adam Silver. They put him in a position where Silver couldn't do anything other than strike back hard, and he did. And now they're left with basically no avenue. Like they could try to take this outside of the NBA and into court. But the history of the legal system and American professional sports leagues is the head office can do what it wants to the teams, you know? That's what has been upheld every single time. I don't think the Clippers have a way out of this. And I think beyond the fact that they did this bad thing, this is like a self-inflicted wound. Like I don't know what a smoking gun is, but there's a lot of pistols running around in that report with red eyes listening to Grateful Dead on repeat, you know? Like they're done, they're doomed, and they could have avoided the worst of this if they had just voluntarily taken a smaller punishment.