{"id":827849,"date":"2026-09-04T13:39:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T13:39:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/827849\/"},"modified":"2026-09-04T13:39:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T13:39:16","slug":"pablo-torres-clippers-victory-lap-is-well-earned-and-needed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/827849\/","title":{"rendered":"Pablo Torre’s Clippers Victory Lap Is Well Earned\u2014and Needed"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tShortly 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<\/a>\u2019 alleged circumvention of the NBA<\/a> salary cap via an almost laughably fishy endorsement scheme, the host of Pablo Torre Finds Out celebrated the very public validation of his team\u2019s Pulitzer-worthy reporting with a livestream that matched the running time of Casablanca.<\/p>\n

If the Bogie\/Bergman film is perhaps too highbrow a reference, given the low-rent shenanigans that Steve Ballmer<\/a>\u2019s 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\u2019s hour-and-forty-two-minute Snoopy dance is the 1978 exploitation flick I Spit on Your Grave. To Torre\u2019s credit, he did not expectorate on anyone\u2019s final resting place, although that may only be because all of his most vocal critics are still among the living.<\/p>\n

A more small-minded person than Torre might very well have had metaphorical loogies lined up for the likes of Mark Cuban<\/a> and Bill Simmons, who were among PTFO\u2019s 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 (\u201cI\u2019m on Team Ballmer \u2026 The idea that the default is Ballmer is the bad guy is going to back fire [sic] on [Torre].\u201d), would subsequently appear on PTFO to debate Torre\u2019s findings.<\/p>\n

Cuban\u2019s argument never amounted to more than an exercise in post hoc rationalization\u2014having selectively arrived at the conclusion that Ballmer had done nothing in contravention of the NBA bylaws, he simply worked backwards from that flawed conviction\u2014although he never stooped to accusing Torre of \u201cpretending you\u2019re a journalist.\u201d <\/p>\n

That dopey rejoinder was a product of Simmons\u2019 febrile brain, which had been jostled by a separate PTFO report about Bill Belichick\u2019s relationship with Jordon Hudson.<\/p>\n

For what it\u2019s worth, Cuban responded to Wednesday afternoon\u2019s newsbreak with a terse tweet (\u201cCongrats Pablo.\u201d), while Simmons did not acknowledge Torre\u2019s 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\u2019s criticism of Simmons\u2019 decision to get into bed with ChatGPT. (The erstwhile Boston Sports Guy has put in an awful lot of rake-stepping this week.)<\/p>\n

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. \u201cWe vehemently reject the NBA\u2019s findings, which are the result of a heavily biased investigation seeking to justify a predetermined narrative rather than facts and evidence,\u201d the team\u2019s statement read. \u201cFor 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a separate missive to NBA commissioner Adam Silver<\/a>, the head of the Clippers\u2019 legal reps dismissed the PTFO investigation as \u201cpodcast allegations.\u201d While the deflationary semantic feint is certainly amusing, Ballmer\u2019s reaction is not going to raise too many chuckles among the rest of the NBA\u2019s ruling class. In threatening to fight the allegations<\/a>, Ballmer and his crew effectively declared war on the 29 other owners.<\/p>\n

Part of what makes the substantiation of Torre\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

While the world will continue to be run by vampiric one-percenters who decidedly do not have our best interests at heart\u2014last 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\u2014Torre\u2019s dogged unearthing of the Ballmer-Aspiration<\/a>-Kawhi story at least offers some hope that the mutant elite may still be held to account. <\/p>\n

Like, maybe we don\u2019t necessarily have to keep letting these people get away with it all the time, and by \u201cit,\u201d I mean [twirls around like Maria von Trapp on party drugs while pointing at literally everything].<\/p>\n

The thing is, Ballmer\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201ceveryone hates you for everything\u201d when you\u2019re a tech oligarch, this despite your devotion to \u201cgrinding for a decade trying to help make superintelligence to cure cancer or whatever.\u201d<\/p>\n

When not striving to rid the world of malignant neoplasms, 1,200 of Altman\u2019s bots recently participated in what\u2019s been characterized as a \u201csecurity event.\u201d 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!<\/p>\n

What\u2019s funny about all this is that Torre probably never would have had the wherewithal to pursue the story if ESPN hadn\u2019t let him walk out the door in 2023. That\u2019s not to suggest that Disney\u2019s relationship with the NBA would necessarily scotch a critical examination of the Clippers\u2019 business dealings, but that Torre wouldn\u2019t have had the freedom\/time\/resources necessary to tackle this sort of undertaking if he were still clocking in every morning at Bristol. <\/p>\n

Either way, the guy pushed all his chips onto the section of felt that reads \u201cPablo Torre\u201d and the big bet paid off. (Hopefully, all the Woodstein comparisons don\u2019t go straight to his head and he continues to devote entire episodes of PTFO to ripping bong hits with Dan Soder and Katie Nolan.)<\/p>\n

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<\/a> the NBA laid on the Clippers.<\/p>\n

\u201cSteve Ballmer is so essential to the league\u2019s big business initiatives, and by big, I mean domestic and international expansion,\u201d Wilbon said on Wednesday\u2019s installment of Pardon the Interruption. \u201cThat is why largely I didn\u2019t see the richest owner in the NBA, as you know, getting any big hit. It\u2019s not what I thought they would find, it\u2019s that I thought they could find anything and they wouldn\u2019t do anything about it. So it\u2019s a surprise to me, and it\u2019s a big hit.\u201d<\/p>\n

For those who despair of ever getting out from under the thumbs of zillionaire technocrats, Torre\u2019s validation made for a pleasant surprise indeed. And there may be more where that came from. \u201cI encourage people to, like, dig in as we continue to cover and investigate it, especially now that it seems like the story isn\u2019t over yet,\u201d Torre said. \u201cThis is not everything.\u00a0There is still more. \u2026 And it\u2019s delightful.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shortly after the fruits of his labor were splashed all over the internet, Pablo Torre hopped on YouTube…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":827850,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3789],"tags":[2214,7,559,4034,192,4032,251,135,4033,4031,2087,6,3677],"class_list":["post-827849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles-clippers","tag-adam-silver","tag-basketball","tag-clippers","tag-la","tag-la-clippers","tag-laclippers","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-clippers","tag-losangeles","tag-losangelesclippers","tag-mark-cuban","tag-nba","tag-steve-ballmer"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/117213053931173605","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=827849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/827850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=827849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=827849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=827849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}