No matter how deep down the Kawhi Leonard hole investigative journalist Pablo Torre seems to dig, we’re only at the beginning of the NBA’s investigation into the Clippers star’s now-infamous endorsement deal with Aspiration. Think of a standard tampering investigation, the sort we might see once or twice in an offseason.
When the New York Knicks were investigated for tampering on Jalen Brunson, for instance, that investigation opened on Aug. 6, 2022 and closed on Dec. 21, 2022. For the 76ers with P.J. Tucker and Danuel House, the investigation opened on Jul 29, 2022 and closed on Oct. 31, 2022. Essentially, even a tampering investigation typically takes four or five months. A cap circumvention investigation, especially one featuring a bankrupt company and criminal proceedings, is substantially more complicated and may well involve CBA-induced arbitration. This very likely isn’t getting solved before the season begins. For all we know, it might not get solved before the season even ends.
What twists and turns the saga might take between now and then are unknowable, but eventually, it is going to end in one of two ways. The first would be exoneration. There are questions that would come out of that, certainly, like what sort of message it would send to other potential circumventers if the amount of evidence Torre has compiled is not actionable, but ultimately, this is the “business as usual” path. The Clippers would continue on their intended trajectory.
The alternative is, obviously guilt. And that’s where things get complicated. The CBA prescribes several possible punishments in that scenario for cap circumvention, including:
- A fine of up to $7.5 million.
- A suspension of up to one year for any team personnel found to be willfully engaged in the violation.
- Contracts or transactions that violate league rules can be voided.
- The forfeiture of draft picks.
A fine is relatively straightforward. That’s pocket change for Steve Ballmer. But the other punishments leave a bit more room for nuance. How exactly could the NBA go about stripping the Clippers of draft picks, for instance? Which draft picks would be in play? Could the Clippers themselves impact that decision, and could other teams? What about voiding Leonard’s contract? What are the ramifications of such a decision. Let’s dive into each of these possible punishments and try to sort through what might be possible if this investigation proves wrongdoing.
Loss of draft picks
The question of how many draft picks the Clippers can lose ultimately depends on what the investigation finds. When the Minnesota Timberwolves were caught circumventing the salary cap with Joe Smith in 2000, they were stripped of five first-round picks, but ultimately got two of them back. In all likelihood, that is the absolute ceiling here. Without knowing what the investigation finds, though, there’s just no way of predicting a possible punishment.
But there is a different question related to draft picks that we can consider now: which draft picks would the league ultimately choose to take if the investigation warrants such a penalty? Broadly speaking, we can break the Clippers’ first-round draft capital into four categories:
- Owed outright. Either the Oklahoma City Thunder or the Washington Wizards will wind up with the Clipper pick in 2026. The Philadelphia 76ers will in 2028. These picks are unprotected and owed with no strings attached.
- Partially encumbered. In 2027, the Clippers owe a top-five protected first-round swap to the Thunder. In 2029, the Clippers owe a top-three protected first-round swap to the 76ers.
- Unencumbered and tradable. The Clippers, as of today, have first-round picks in 2030, 2031 and 2032 that are eligible for trades.
- Unencumbered but untradable. The Clippers, like every other team in the NBA, control all of their picks from 2033 on. However, as first-round picks can be traded no more than seven years into the future, the Clippers do not currently have access to those picks.
That first set is the easiest. The 2026 and 2028 picks are gone. There’s nothing the NBA can do about them. Every other set, though, comes with substantial questions attached.
In theory, the NBA could strip the Clippers of their picks in 2027 and 2029. Those are the soonest upcoming picks, after all, so it would make some degree of sense. The Thunder and 76ers would, in this scenario, simply get the better of their own pick or the Clippers’, with the pick that would have landed in Los Angeles just getting removed from the draft pool.
However, the 76ers and Thunder could potentially have a grievance here. Those Clipper picks, as of now, are protected. Therefore, however small it may be, the Clippers do have some incentive to be bad in those seasons. The odds of them protecting their pick in either year are relatively small, but they exist. Now, that’s a double-edged sword. The 76ers and Thunder just lived that out last season, when the 76ers owed a top-six protected pick to the Thunder. They tanked for it, and it fell at No. 3, allowing them to keep it. Obviously, neither the 76ers nor the Thunder would want the Clippers to keep their pick.
However, if the 76ers hadn’t gotten lucky on lottery night, the pick would have come in at No. 7. That would have given Oklahoma City literally the highest pick that trade could have yielded last season. Having protected swap rights with a bad team is a high-risk, high-reward venture. You might not get to use those swap rights, but if you do, they are more valuable than they would have been had the team in question been good. And that’s where the grievance comes in. The 76ers or Thunder could argue that stripping the Clippers of these picks alters the value of their own picks. Whether or not they would is unclear, but this is the issue with removing encumbered picks. As much as we like to pretend otherwise, motivations affect the draft order.
Fine. Let’s say the encumbered picks are off-limits. That takes us to those picks from 2030 through 2032. They are for the time being available to be stripped… but they are also technically available to be traded. It’s obviously unlikely that the Clippers trade themselves deeper into future debt than they already are, but there’s also the potential for some gamesmanship here. If the Clippers are worried about a significant penalty, perhaps they’ll view this season as their last, best chance at a championship and choose to go all in. Conversely, if they know they are innocent, they could use the fear of the investigation to juice the value of those picks and trade them for more returning value than they might have otherwise been able to get. Are either of these scenarios likely? Of course not. But they’re on the table.
And that takes us to that last set of picks, basically any beyond 2033. The CBA doesn’t specify which picks are on the table in a situation like this, and the fact that they can’t be traded likely wouldn’t affect whether or not they could be taken through a league-induced penalty. But the unintended consequences could be significant there. Those picks are almost, and potentially more than, a decade away. How many active Clippers will still be in the league at that point? Will they have the same front office? In a perfect world, the NBA would prefer a penalty like this to be swift. They’d want the team to feel it, but not to demoralize a fanbase for 10 years or more. But the picks the Clippers currently owe change the equation here. There isn’t really an immediate, picks-based penalty the NBA could impose. For something more immediate, the NBA would have to turn its attention to Leonard.
Voiding Kawhi’s contract?
Despite reporting that the Clippers will move on from Leonard at the expiration of his existing contract, he’s essential to their immediate pursuits. The Clippers just came one game away from beating the team that came one game away from knocking out the champs. They might be a fringe contender, but the word “contender” is in that sentence. This era is coming to an end, but it isn’t quite over. Any ambitions the Clippers might harbor for the 2025-26 season depend on Leonard. That’s not as true of the 2026-27 season given the cap space the Clippers could theoretically create, but he’s currently on the books, so he’s almost certainly in their plans.
Voiding his contract obviously puts an end to any immediate championship hopes the Clippers currently hold, but it also makes him a free agent. That’s not much of a problem if it happens in May. He’d just going into July looking for a new contract like any other free agent. But what if the investigation ends in January? Nobody wants a scenario in which Leonard is, say, free to sign with the Lakers for the minimum right before the playoffs.
Every buyout season we are reminded that a player needs to clear waivers by March 1 in order to be playoff-eligible. But Leonard wouldn’t be waived in this scenario, and that is the only in-season deadline for playoff eligibility the CBA offers. The NBA could try to suspend Leonard for the remainder of the season, but that would create issues with the union, who would likely appeal and take great interest in the case.
Meanwhile, there’s an argument to be made here that the Clippers would actually benefit from voiding Leonard’s deal. He’s owed $50.3 million for the 2026-27 season, when he will be 35. However, the most expensive guaranteed contract on the books for the Clippers that season is the $19.5 million owed to Ivica Zubac. Only around $13.3 million is guaranteed for James Harden, and most of the team simply expires at the end of the season. The Clippers had paths to significant cap space even with Leonard. Without him? They control the summer of 2026 in free agency. Most of the best possible free agents have already extended, but helping the Clippers rebuild with younger talent hardly screams punishment.
Some voices have suggested voiding the deal, but counting the money against the Clippers’ cap anyway. Appropriate as such a punishment might be, there’s no language allowing for that within the CBA. John Hollinger of The Athletic has proposed counting the money Leonard received from Aspiration against the cap for the Clippers, but again, we’re in uncharted waters here. There’s neither precedent nor language within the CBA that specifically allows for anything like this.
Discipline against team personnel
The CBA outlines a possible one-year suspension for team staffers involved in cap circumvention. That could apply to Steve Ballmer or any other members of the Clipper front office if they are found to have participated in a circumvention scheme with Leonard. When the NBA uncovered the Joe Smith scandal, both Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor and general manager Kevin McHale were kept away from the team until the summer of 2001.
But there’s another penalty, albeit an unlikely one, that’s worth mentioning in light of this particular team’s history. In 2014, Adam Silver banned Donald Sterling from the NBA for life. The plan was to use a three-fourths vote among the owners to terminate his ownership, but his wife Shelly cooperated with the league and the team was ultimately sold to Ballmer. The procedure for such a vote is laid out in Articles 13 and 14 of the NBA’s constitution.
Article 13 covers a number of violations for which an owner can be voted out by the Board of Governors. The potentially applicable violations here are also the broadest. Article 13(a) says that an owner may be terminated if they “Willfully violate any of the provisions of the Constitution and By-Laws, resolutions, or agreements of the Association,” and Article 13(d) says the same if they “Fail or refuse to fulfill its contractual obligations to the Association, its Members, Players, or any other third party in such a way as to affect the Association or its Members adversely.” Cap circumvention would seemingly qualify.
Article 14 then lays out the procedure for such a vote. “Any Member of the Association or the Commissioner may charge that a Member or Owner has violated one (1) or more of the provisions of Article 13. Said charge shall be made in Writing and shall be filed with the Commissioner, who shall, no later than three (3) business days after the charges are filed, cause a copy thereof to be served by a Writing upon the Member or Owner against whom such charges have been made.”
Essentially, any owner or the commissioner can bring up these charges. The charged owner will then have five days to respond to the charges. Within 10 days, a special meeting of the board of governors would be held to serve as a hearing. Afterward, the other owners can vote to terminate the owner, with a three-fourths majority needed to do so. If this happens, the team is placed under the control of the commissioner.
This is, again, exceedingly unlikely. By all accounts, Ballmer is popular among the other owners. Even if he wasn’t, there’s a reason the league doesn’t make a habit of forcing sales and issuing lifetime bans. Nobody wants to set that precedent. It’s hard to imagine, based on what we know at this time, that this would be on the table.
We also don’t know what will be uncovered in the investigation, and there’s the reality here that Ballmer simply has resources even his wealthiest peers do not. In April, Forbes estimated Ballmer’s net worth at $118 billion. The next wealthiest owners in the NBA would be the Adelsons (Mavericks owners) at an estimated $32.1 billion. Most other owners, though exceedingly wealthy, are not in that stratosphere. If there is a sense here that a single owner is wielding his considerable financial power to upset the competitive balance of the sport, well, that’s the sort of thing that might bother a group of slightly less wealthy competitors who want to operate on a level playing field and still turn a profit while doing it. Most owners aren’t eager to throw an extra $28 million at a player, legal or not. The overwhelming likelihood here is that this is not where the investigation leads. However, given the severity of the charges and the potential for the investigation to escalate, it can’t be fully ruled out, either.
Where would this leave the Clippers and the NBA?
We’ve laid out so many hypotheticals here that making any absolute predictions about the Clippers’ future would be foolish. What we can say with some measure of clarity, though, is that the Clippers have, for the past year or so, been gearing up for a reboot. They are one of several teams seemingly watching Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokić, who can both become free agents in the summer of 2027. They haven’t traded any future draft capital since landing James Harden in 2023, indicating that they are likely reserving those chips for the next version of their team.
If those picks are stripped away, though, any significant trade is almost certainly off the table. The Clippers are operating from an asset deficit already thanks to the Harden and Paul George trades. While Antetokounmpo and Jokić technically can become free agents in 2027, it has become exceedingly rare for stars of their caliber to move via free agency. The last players to do so were ironically Clippers. Kawhi Leonard headlined the wild summer of 2019 in free agency, and Paul George moving in 2024 was seen as the potential beginning of a free agent renaissance that has not yet borne fruit. Taken together, a substantial punishment makes it substantially harder for the Clippers to add a younger star in the near term, or at least one of Antetokounmpo’s or Jokić’s caliber. Frankly, even if those players were interested, it was always hard to imagine them choosing the Clippers when Luka Dončić and the Lakers are right down the road with similar cap space and a far brighter future.
However, if they were stripped of their picks, free agency would become their last, best shot at building any sort of competitive team. They’re still in Los Angeles. They’d still have relatively clean books. Perhaps the MVPs wouldn’t be available, but players still want to live in Los Angeles, and the Clippers still have a fairly strong front office. Remember, between the Leonard-George era and the Chris Paul-Blake Griffin era, the Clippers won 48 games in the 2018-19 season without an All-Star on the roster. Something like this might have to become the model: find the best players you can, try to be decent, and then figure out a longer-term direction from there.
Two teams rooting against that would obviously be the 76ers and Thunder, and that’s the undercurrent to all of this. The reigning NBA champions control draft picks from a team currently under investigation for cap circumvention. The 76ers aren’t nearly as daunting, but they’re in the Eastern Conference and have plenty of talent themselves. This investigation has a chance to either sustain a Thunder dynasty or build a champion in Philadelphia depending on the severity and scope of the punishments here. The ramifications of this investigation are going to reverberate far beyond Los Angeles.