The Los Angeles Clippers are alleged to have set up a no-show job for star forward Kawhi Leonard to help convince him to sign with the team. And not just any no-show job, but a $28 million, multi-year gig with a carbon credit/tree-planting company that has since gone bankrupt, and whose co-founder has been indicted on federal fraud charges. Among the many questions raised by this story, there is also one answer. It is to the question “Is a centimillionaire superstar like Kawhi Leonard too big a name to be lured into a Sopranos B-plot?” and the answer appears to be no.
The report, which arrives courtesy of the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, walks us through 80 minutes of exposition explaining how the Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer allegedly helped set up the no-show job through a very well-connected and very vaguely defined carbon credit concern called Aspiration, Inc., a company in which Ballmer himself had invested $50 million. The reason for all this, according to the podcast's reporting, was to help the Clippers circumvent the NBA's salary cap during their free agent pursuit of Leonard. Not only did the Clippers pay Leonard the most they could under league rules, but they found a way to pay him a little bit more outside of them.
Leonard was, according to the scheme, to be paid $7 million for each of four years to endorse Aspiration, which is an odd name if you imagine the alternate definition of "aspirate." In what is maybe the only truly on-brand part of this, the famously private Leonard never did any endorsements. All he ever really needed to do to make the setup believable, and presumably defensible, was to appear in an advertisement or make some kind of public endorsement, maybe once per year; the other very famous people that Aspiration paid, including Robert Downey Jr., Drake, Cindy Crawford, and Leonardo DiCaprio, all managed to do this. That Leonard did not do even this minuscule amount of lifting made the scheme almost too detectable. A famous person making $28 million for a few confusing billboards or easily skipped YouTube preroll ads is par for the course, but getting paid $28 million for nothing feels more obviously suspect. For the record, the Clippers issued a denial to Torre's show.
Mostly, we marvel at the low-rent nature of the scheme as it was laid out in the podcast. Paying folks under the table for services not rendered is such classic mob-movie stuff, one of the oldest and most downscale bits of comedic graft imaginable. If the Clippers needed to close the deal that badly, Ballmer himself could have just dropped the cash to Leonard off the books instead of clumsily laundering it through a disgraced greenwashing concern. Presumably cap compliance does not require allowing commissioner Adam Silver to go through all of an owner's bank accounts, but even if it does, this was a particularly hilarious way to go about it. We also labored under the illusion that a no-show job would be beneath Leonard's stature as a player, which now feels pretty silly as well. Maybe Leonard didn't care how he got the money as long as he got it, but now he subjects himself to visions of him wielding a shovel, Grant Wood style.
Unless this is a frame-up by Big Laker, the details in this reporting reek of delicious randomness and inconsequentiality. The Clippers have won the same number of championships with Leonard as they have before him: zero. The Lakers' reputational hegemony has not been affected by anything the Clippers have done, unless Luka Doncic is getting paid $40 million for a vaguely defined consulting gig with a roofing company in Temecula.
And that's what we want here: a rash of teams circumventing the cap by using old-timey tactics to create workarounds to the current byzantine NBA cap rules. If the league is going to be piling on the aprons and luxury taxes, the free market’s response would invariably be a bunch of dodgy off-books appearance fees and endorsement gigs. Players will look upon no-show jobs as the newest affectation separating the mega-paid stars from the hyper-paid stars. Silver will sweat formaldehyde while trying to explain it all, and punish the guy he begged to save the Clippers from Donald Sterling 11 years ago.
The possibilities aren't endless—there are only 450 roster spots, and Aspiration Inc. has expired—but these no-show jobs can be for an end-of-the-bench towel waver as well as a superstar. Better still, until the salary cap is rendered inert by universal circumvention, every team can do it. Only we'd like to think they'd be more artful about disguising it than the Clippers (allegedly) were. There is a lesson for the 30 ownership groups here: Wealth does not in itself confer cleverness. It doesn't take much to pull off a scam like this, but it takes more effort than anyone exerted here. In fact, that might be Ballmer's most compelling defense: We could not possibly be this stupid. We'd absolutely revel in the discovery motions on that proposition.
