- NBA commissioner Adam Silver said he was unaware of allegations against the Los Angeles Clippers before they were made public.
- The NBA has launched an investigation into claims the Clippers facilitated a $28 million endorsement deal for Kawhi Leonard to circumvent the salary cap.
- The league has hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to lead the inquiry into the matter.
NEW YORK — NBA commissioner Adam Silver, for the first time publicly addressing allegations that the Los Angeles Clippers circumvented the salary cap and facilitated a $28 million “no-show” endorsement deal for star Kawhi Leonard, said the claims caught him off guard.
“It was news to me,” Silver said Wednesday, Sept. 10 from the St. Regis Hotel in midtown Manhattan. “Frankly, I had never heard of the company Aspiration before, and I’d never heard a whiff of anything around an endorsement deal with Kawhi or anything around an engagement with the Los Angeles Clippers, so it was all new to me.”
At the center of the allegations is a four-year, $28 million contract Leonard signed to market and endorse a now-bankrupt ‘green’ financial services company called Aspiration, which had previously received a significant investment from Clippers owner Steve Ballmer.
Silver spoke to reporters Wednesday after the conclusion of a Board of Governors meeting held here. On the agenda was the state of the All-Star Game, domestic and international expansion and the overall state of play in the NBA. But the session also presented an opportunity for other ownership groups to question Ballmer in a closed-door setting.
Silver characterized the comments other stakeholders made to him as “a reservation of judgment.” He did add, however, that he has been encouraged by the response to the severity of the allegations.
“To suggest that there is a stigma around it would almost be an understatement,” Silver said. “The amount of attention that this has commanded, certainly no one is out there saying, ‘Oh, this is business as usual in the NBA, what’s the big deal? This is what teams do when they want to sign players.’
“People, in fact — their suggestion is that this is highly abhorrent behavior.”
NBA spokesman Mike Bass confirmed in a Sept. 3 email to USA TODAY Sports that the league would launch an investigation into the matter. The NBA has contracted the New York-based law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz — which it has used in the past for other investigations — to lead the inquiry.
If the Clippers are found to have circumvented the salary cap, the penalties could be steep.
According to Article XIII of the collective bargaining agreement, the league could “impose a fine of up to” $4.5 million for a first-time violation. A second violation could trigger a $5.5 million fine and forfeiture of a first-round draft pick.
Another section under the same article prohibits unauthorized agreements; a violation of that section could trigger a fine of up to $7.5 million, forfeiture of draft picks, the voiding of player contracts, a fine of up to $350,000 to the player, a prohibition of the player signing an additional contract with the violating team and a one-year suspension of “any Team personnel found to have willfully engaged in such violation.”
The Clippers have already been found to have engaged in impropriety with third-party endorsements under Ballmer. In August 2015 — a year after Ballmer’s purchase of the team was finalized — the NBA fined the team $250,000 for “violating NBA rules prohibiting teams from offering players unauthorized business or investment opportunities” in their pursuit of then-free agent center DeAndre Jordan.
A second violation almost certainly would trigger a massive penalty.
“My powers are very broad,” Silver continued. “I have the full range of financial penalties, draft picks (forfeitures), suspensions, et cetera. I have very broad power in these situations.”
Silver, though, reiterated that he and the NBA would practice prudence, saying the burden would be on the league to uncover evidence — circumstantial or otherwise — to prove that the Clippers had engaged in wrongdoing before it levies any discipline.
“In the case of the league, we and our investigators look at the totality of the evidence,” Silver said. “Whether mere appearance — just by the way the words read, as a matter of fundamental fairness — I would be reluctant to act if there was a mere appearance of impropriety. I think the goal of the investigation is to find out if there was impropriety. …
“I’ve been around the league long enough with different permutations of allegations and accusations that I’m a big believer in due process and fairness. We’ll let the investigation run its course.”