As the dust settles following the NBA's obliteration of the Clippers over the Kawhi Leonard–Aspiration scandal, one of the more interesting vectors of fallout is on the media side. After all, the scandal kicked off following a series of reports from podcaster Pablo Torre, who is mentioned in the first line of the official investigation's report, and was later stage-managed for the public several times over by ESPN, Torre's former employer. Despite the company's status as the big dog of sports journalism, it bungled the biggest NBA story of the year at every stage.
ESPN is where Clippers owner Steve Ballmer went to plead his innocence two days after Torre broke the story last September. It's also where the most seemingly authoritative piece of reporting on the scandal emerged in the weeks before the release of the league's report. That story, from Aug. 17, has aged horribly, as its framing was that the investigation would clear the Clippers of wrongdoing; two weeks later, they were clobbered. So what are we to make of this sequence of events?
In the aftermath of the NBA handing down its punishment, criticism of ESPN's story has tended to take a certain shape: The once-proud Worldwide Leader in Sports has shamed itself, having abandoned quality journalism in favor of Pat McAfee. While broadly correct, that critique doesn't really apply here. One might assume the Aug. 17 story had been riddled with factual errors, but that isn't entirely correct. The story—triple-bylined by Don Van Natta Jr., Baxter Holmes, and Ramona Shelburne, with additional reporting credits for Shams Charania and Bobby Marks—wasn't exactly wrong on the facts. The crux of it was that the league's investigation had found no evidence of Ballmer having "funneled money through team sponsors to pay Kawhi Leonard in order to circumvent the salary cap." Rather, according to the ESPN story, the investigation was focused "on whether the team's introduction of Leonard to team sponsors constitutes a violation of the league's rules prohibiting salary cap circumvention." That's basically coherent with what's in the report, produced by the Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz law firm.
The Wachtell report's biggest specific claims are that the Clips were "affirmatively initiating off-court income opportunities between Mr. Leonard and four companies doing business with the team" and "inducing the companies to enter into these agreements by offering and providing them with business from the Clippers." While that set of conclusions is sort of aligned with the ESPN story, the problem is that the specific findings add up to pretty clear salary cap circumvention. It's less a problem of getting the facts wrong, and more an issue of framing and editorial judgment.
Which is not to say that issue isn't real, or significant. The most important part of such a piece of Kremlinology is showing the public the state of negotiations and giving us an idea of where things are headed. The Aug. 17 story suggested that the NBA's eventual punishment of the Clippers would be a relatively light one. That aspect was pretty clearly sourced from the Clippers' side of negotiations; at the time, the team had a clear interest in getting out ahead of the league and laying the groundwork for asserting Ballmer's innocence. To wit: When the Aug. 17 story dropped, many of the same people now decrying ESPN's journalism failures took that story as the basis for leveling the same charges of derelict journalism at Torre. Puck, the media world's sneeringest outlet and one that has made it impossible to unsubscribe from any of their annoying newsletters despite me trying like 100 times, ran a bizarre story about how Torre was somehow besmirching the good name of the New York Times with hip-hop-style podcasting. But the five-headed ESPN team was clearly working on a faulty set of assumptions, and they got burned.
While they clearly got the investigation's findings and result wrong, I think what the ESPN team reported was a mostly accurate encapsulation of the state of negotiations at that time. I base this in large part on what the Clippers organization has said in the last 24 hours. It seems that at the last second the NBA pulled a fast one on the club and, by extension, ESPN. One strong thread in the Aug. 17 story was that Clippers and the league took extremely combative approaches to each other throughout the investigation. The Wachtell report agrees, claiming investigators were "challenged by, among other things, the approach of the Clippers and their outside counsel, who at times delayed in responding to requests for information and operated in an adversarial or obfuscatory manner that slowed investigators’ ability to gather the facts."
According to a long, cranky statement from the team's lawyers, the NBA was lying to the Clippers for a while.
League counsel has acknowledged in our discussions that the league does not believe there was an agreement between the Clippers and Aspiration to funnel money to Kawhi Leonard. League counsel also agreed with the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a federal judge that Mr. Ballmer was a victim of Joe Sanberg's fraud—not a participant. Nonetheless, with less than an hour's warning, and no opportunity to respond, the league has issued a report and accompanying press release purporting to conclude the exact opposite of what it has said privately.
Instead, the league is intent on punishing Mr. Ballmer and the Clippers based on an entirely new theory: that the Clippers introduced Kawhi Leonard, at his request, to certain team vendors and sponsors. Wachtell has known about these introductions for months, yet raised them only at the eleventh hour—a pivot that demonstrates the league's predetermined decision to reach an adverse finding.
I don't think you necessarily have to believe the Clippers here—again, even though their actual transgressions aren't immoral or problematic in any way and only constitute a violation of the cartel rules agreed upon by billionaires to effectively suppress wages for labor—but their contention does go some distance toward explaining the Aug. 17 story's wrongness. If the NBA was lying to the Clippers or holding out on them, then ESPN simply got caught in the same maneuver.
There are two possibilities. The league could have been misleading the Clippers, and by proxy ESPN, all along, which isn't a real problem since this isn't a court of law. Alternatively, the league got so pissed about the Clippers sending up a trial balloon via ESPN that they switched it up at the last second and decided to burn the organization.
That dissonance is instructive. Again, the burden on the league is less legal and more proprietary, so we ultimately have to consider which constituencies they're choosing to please. The players wouldn't want a harsh punishment here, since it means less money for them and an even harsher policing of the salary cap. Ownership is probably split on the issue, especially if one assumes, as you should, that at least some other teams are doing stuff similar to the Clippers' shady Aspiration deal. Ballmer acts as their sin eater, and in the heavy-handed punishment they get a reification of their wage-suppression system.
In my view, the primary audience the NBA is trying to appease with its handling of the investigation consists of the public and the media, two groups conjoined in constant two-way dialogue about an ill-defined, shapeshifting standard: the league's credibility. The most important thing to broadcast is the appearance of legitimacy, and while there's certainly an aspect of performance in play here, I do think it's a concern worth taking seriously. The NBA only works and makes billions of dollars because of the public's trust. From that perspective what mattered most about the ESPN story wasn't whether its findings were true, but that those findings suggested a league preparing to close ranks in spite of clear cheating everyone could see.
In that light, perhaps ESPN's failure was publishing too early—when there was still time for its reporters' claims to be made false, by an institution that needed them to be.
