Shortly after the fruits of his labor were splashed all over the internet, Pablo Torre hopped on YouTube to take what amounted to a 102-minute victory lap. Nearly a year to the day after dropping a detonative report about the Los Angeles Clippers’ alleged circumvention of the NBA salary cap via an almost laughably fishy endorsement scheme, the host of Pablo Torre Finds Out celebrated the very public validation of his team’s Pulitzer-worthy reporting with a livestream that matched the running time of Casablanca.
If the Bogie/Bergman film is perhaps too highbrow a reference, given the low-rent shenanigans that Steve Ballmer’s crew allegedly got up to (as we shall see below, the Clippers and their owner deny all wrongdoing), perhaps a more fitting analogue to Torre’s hour-and-forty-two-minute Snoopy dance is the 1978 exploitation flick I Spit on Your Grave. To Torre’s credit, he did not expectorate on anyone’s final resting place, although that may only be because all of his most vocal critics are still among the living.
A more small-minded person than Torre might very well have had metaphorical loogies lined up for the likes of Mark Cuban and Bill Simmons, who were among PTFO’s most leather-lunged detractors in the wake of the release of the year-ago Clippers bombshell. Cuban, who took to his socials last year to declare his allegiances to one of his fellows in the billionaire class (“I’m on Team Ballmer … The idea that the default is Ballmer is the bad guy is going to back fire [sic] on [Torre].”), would subsequently appear on PTFO to debate Torre’s findings.
Cuban’s argument never amounted to more than an exercise in post hoc rationalization—having selectively arrived at the conclusion that Ballmer had done nothing in contravention of the NBA bylaws, he simply worked backwards from that flawed conviction—although he never stooped to accusing Torre of “pretending you’re a journalist.”
That dopey rejoinder was a product of Simmons’ febrile brain, which had been jostled by a separate PTFO report about Bill Belichick’s relationship with Jordon Hudson.
For what it’s worth, Cuban responded to Wednesday afternoon’s newsbreak with a terse tweet (“Congrats Pablo.”), while Simmons did not acknowledge Torre’s long-overdue validation. Could be he was too busy dodging calls from the Massachusetts Gaming Commission or dealing with blowback from The Ringer MVP Sean Fennessey’s criticism of Simmons’ decision to get into bed with ChatGPT. (The erstwhile Boston Sports Guy has put in an awful lot of rake-stepping this week.)
Another very visible figure who has yet to offer Torre an apology is Ballmer himself, although if the statement released by the Clippers is any indication, the former Microsoft CEO is unlikely to issue a mea culpa to anyone, any time soon. “We 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,” the team’s statement read. “For the past year, we cooperated fully and in good faith and we will now fight just as hard to demonstrate our innocence. We intend to vigorously challenge these findings and penalties through every avenue available to us and look forward to an ethical and impartial arbitration process.”
In a separate missive to NBA commissioner Adam Silver, the head of the Clippers’ legal reps dismissed the PTFO investigation as “podcast allegations.” While the deflationary semantic feint is certainly amusing, Ballmer’s reaction is not going to raise too many chuckles among the rest of the NBA’s ruling class. In threatening to fight the allegations, Ballmer and his crew effectively declared war on the 29 other owners.
Part of what makes the substantiation of Torre’s reporting so sweet is that PTFO is living proof that journalism can still thrive in a country that is slowly starving itself to death on a steady diet of algorithmically boosted dreck. The Pulitzer is nice and all, but the Wachtell report and the NBA’s subsequent move to act on those findings are a testament to the idea that there is still a place in this sad, debased world where the unapproachable mega-wealthy caste may be held to account for their sundry misdeeds.
While the world will continue to be run by vampiric one-percenters who decidedly do not have our best interests at heart—last year, Peter Thiel apparently had to run a few dozen logic trees before eventually answering a direct question as to whether the human race should survive, which: yipes—Torre’s dogged unearthing of the Ballmer-Aspiration-Kawhi story at least offers some hope that the mutant elite may still be held to account.
Like, maybe we don’t necessarily have to keep letting these people get away with it all the time, and by “it,” I mean [twirls around like Maria von Trapp on party drugs while pointing at literally everything].
The thing is, Ballmer’s one of the more palatable Scrooge McDuck types. His unbridled enthusiasm for the Clippers has made him one of the most popular owners in sports, and he seems to have engendered a genuine fellowship with his players and the legions of fans who cheer them on. As far as anyone can tell, he’s not actively trying to put half of the developed world out of work or kickstart the apocalypse, unlike, say, OpenAI CEO/goblin Sam Altman, who last spring took to Twitter to snivel about how “everyone hates you for everything” when you’re a tech oligarch, this despite your devotion to “grinding for a decade trying to help make superintelligence to cure cancer or whatever.”
When not striving to rid the world of malignant neoplasms, 1,200 of Altman’s bots recently participated in what’s been characterized as a “security event.” Basically, a bunch of OpenAI gremlins not only broke containment, but immediately began colluding to carry out a spookily well-coordinated attack on a rival camp. Nothing to see here!
What’s funny about all this is that Torre probably never would have had the wherewithal to pursue the story if ESPN hadn’t let him walk out the door in 2023. That’s not to suggest that Disney’s relationship with the NBA would necessarily scotch a critical examination of the Clippers’ business dealings, but that Torre wouldn’t have had the freedom/time/resources necessary to tackle this sort of undertaking if he were still clocking in every morning at Bristol.
Either way, the guy pushed all his chips onto the section of felt that reads “Pablo Torre” and the big bet paid off. (Hopefully, all the Woodstein comparisons don’t go straight to his head and he continues to devote entire episodes of PTFO to ripping bong hits with Dan Soder and Katie Nolan.)
Speaking of ESPN and old-school journalism, Mike Wilbon may have had the most interesting read on the situation this week when he acknowledged that he was shocked by the death sentence the NBA laid on the Clippers.
“Steve Ballmer is so essential to the league’s big business initiatives, and by big, I mean domestic and international expansion,” Wilbon said on Wednesday’s installment of Pardon the Interruption. “That is why largely I didn’t see the richest owner in the NBA, as you know, getting any big hit. It’s not what I thought they would find, it’s that I thought they could find anything and they wouldn’t do anything about it. So it’s a surprise to me, and it’s a big hit.”
For those who despair of ever getting out from under the thumbs of zillionaire technocrats, Torre’s validation made for a pleasant surprise indeed. And there may be more where that came from. “I encourage people to, like, dig in as we continue to cover and investigate it, especially now that it seems like the story isn’t over yet,” Torre said. “This is not everything. There is still more. … And it’s delightful.”