There’s one other thing I need to address on this, because I’ve seen some people speculate the other owners aren’t going to want too much light on this because they’re worried about their own cheating. No. Nobody is doing shit like this.
This type of stuff is not happening. If this is Ballmer putting $50m in the business as a way to pay Kawhi Leonard outside of the books, that is SMU stuff. They are going to get absolutely hammered to the full extent that the league possibly can.
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That narrative never made sense, considering the majority of owners just put an effective hard cap in place as a cost control mechanism. Why would they do that if they wanted to shuffle a bunch of money to players under the table. They’re trying to pay players less, not more.
The idea that billionaires who implemented (essentially) a hardcap so they can pay players less are then going around said cap to pay players more is totally conspiracy brained.
What does SMU mean here?
Yeah I doubt other owners have done anything as bad as this regarding basketball related matters.
I think this investigation will be serious and the Clippers might lose picks if the findings are bad.
This entire situation is so funny.
Outside of Clippers fans why would anyone think this was just going away? If the NBA doesn’t come down on this we are effectively entering the death of small market teams.
This ain’t like the 60’s, there is so much money now that billionaires will gladly be dropping 100+ million dollars to moneybag league dominance.
I know the Heat are cool. Mickey just listens to Pat—and Pat don’t play.
For those wondering what SMU means, it’s referring to the multiple massive scandals of Southern Methodist University in the 1980s that resulted in the only football death penalty (cessation do all football operations for a period of two years) ever handed out by the NCAA and the ultimate dissolution of the SWC.
How many teams are notoriously cheap when it comes to paying luxury tax and people really think these guys are then gonna show out $50 million of their own money for something super risky honestly that viewpoint is just silly.
The “everyone is doing it” response to cheating is kind of a trope at this point. Fans did it with patriots and astros and steroid users and on and on. People dont want to be bad people or root for bad people so its easier to dismiss these kind of things by making it seem normal.
What is SMU stuff?
Now I wonder what the GSW have to say about this with all the tax they’ve payed on the last 10 years or so.
it would be cool if there was actually discussion about this without 80% of the threads being redditors bitching about billionaires
I refuse to believe that other owners are not circumventing the cap, but I can totally believe that other owners are not circumventing the cap to quite the degree or scale that Ballmer is.
Despite all the talk of golden state and superteams, Ballmer is the real reason the aprons were adopted. If he’s not strictly limited on the amount of money he can spend, he’ll outspend the rest of the whole league ten times over.
This whole situation is just proof that even with the aprons, he’ll still try to use his ridiculous wealth to gain an unfair advantage, so realistically speaking, if he’s not punished now, the league will be giving him the green light to do whatever the fuck he wants.
I listened to that entire podcast between Mark Cuban and Pablo. Cuban’s argument seems to be that it’s more likely Ballmer knew nothing and this was just a case of Uncle Dennis going to Aspiration, (who was still a month away from investing 300 mil into the clippers and becoming the sponsor but maybe Dennis knew it was coming) and and telling them “hey if you don’t also pay my guy 48 million dollars directly I’m gonna make sure he leaves the clippers and your future sponsorship will be worthless!”… curious if anyone actually buys that logic that a team sponsor would be so concerned about a player leaving that they’d pay 50 million in bribe money to make sure he stays. To the sponsor isn’t the clippers brand value just valuable as a NBA team with or without Kawhi around?
Then if you actually subscribe to Cuban’s logic other aspects just seem even dumber. Like the 7 sources of Pablo all saying that it was common knowledge the whole thing was salary cap circumvention and the owners admitting it to them. Cuban argues the owners would have just said that to just shut them up instead of admit the money was something for more insidious. Wouldn’t it have just been way easier for the owners to tell the employees “yeah we decided to pay Kawhi 50
Mil to ensure he’d stay a clipper to protect our sponsorship value”? How is that worse than “Steve ballmer forced us to do it”?
Then the timing of it all seems even dumber if subscribe to Cuban’s logic. Ballmer invested 50 million into aspiration in September 2021. That was a month after kawhi signed his 4 year extension (August), 3 months before Kawhi sets up his llc (November). You can imagine it being Ballmer, who now had a great ass kissing perk-heavy relationship with Kawhi saying “hey if you sign this extension in a couple months Ill get you a no show sponsorship deal… you have my multi-billionaire word…. I just gotta get the money to them. It’s gonna take a few weeks. Then you’ll set up an LLC and they will give you the money just give me time to get it sorted”… it makes less senses that this sponsor, who wasn’t even a sponsor until September 2021, was talking to uncle Dennis a month prior and saying “No Kawhi don’t leave! Sign the extension! If you don’t our 300 mil investment into the clippers next month will be worthless! Sign it. Then let’s wait 3 months and you can set up an LLC for us to wire you the money next year”
If anything the other owners may have hidden a car payment, or a rent on a condo for a side piece, other owners are not shuffling an extra $50M to a player under the table.
You fools! Cuban has explained in convoluted detail how Brilliant, Billionaire Balmer was scammed by criminal super genius Uncle Dennis!
I mean the other nba owners will say this is an under the table payment which will force Adam Silver to punish the clippers. I mean paying 50 million for player with near zero marketability is very suspect in a company that owner invest/has shares in.
I think if you look at a lot of endorsements and partnerships, you’d find a lot of no-show deals across all the major sports. I’ve been saying that for years.
This is straight up fraud, however.
It would be pointless to agree on a hard cap and then start an arms race in secret, under-the-table payments in which a single owner has a huge advantage over all of the rest.
I’ve been repeating this stuff ad nauseum, if teams all had the ability to give 30-50 million to players under the table the league economy would break, entire rosters have been broken up over less. The CBA would have no reason to exist. Illegal perks probably do happen but they’re more on par with what Ballmer got in trouble for in 2015 with DAJ or outside investments, than gobs of money like this. Like people really need to understand how much money is being discussed here.
I don’t know why everyone is just assuming every owner is doing this. We literally saw that two other organizations (Lakers & Raptors) weren’t gong to do good with Kawhi… if the Lakers aren’t doing it, the biggest franchise in the NBA and the raptors a small market team on the opposite spectrum of the Lakers weren’t doing it. That means the clippers are an outlier of this happening