Of the five players made available to reporters at the Clippers' media day Monday, Kawhi Leonard was the last one up. He slipped into a sweatsuit, sat down at the dais, and said, "I'm ready," as Law Murray of the The Athletic detailed. This was the first time that Leonard faced questions from the press since the revelation of an apparent scheme to funnel him millions of dollars outside his NBA salary, in violation of the league's collective bargaining agreement.
It had been nearly a month since Pablo Torre first reported on the financial relationship between Leonard, the Clippers, and the fraudulent carbon-credit company Aspiration, which signed Leonard to a $28 million endorsement deal and seemingly asked nothing of him in return. The no-show job looked like cap circumvention at the time, and details reported in the weeks since—like a suspiciously timed $2 million investment from a Clippers minority owner in Aspiration, soon followed by the completion of a delayed $1.75 million payment from Aspiration to Leonard—have only made it look sketchier. The NBA has since opened an investigation into the Clippers.
"I don't read headlines, or do conspiracies, theories, or anything like that," Leonard said at media day, in response to a question about how he focuses on training camp with an ongoing NBA investigation. "None of us did no wrongdoing," he added. "We invite the investigations. It's not going to be a distraction for me or the rest of the team."
Leonard also had a longer exchange on the subject with ESPN's Ramona Shelburne:
Shelburne: What is your understanding of the endorsement deal that you had with the company, that's being talked—Aspiration, and did you perform any services for them?
Leonard: When you say understanding, what do you mean?
Shelburne: Of the contract you signed, how much money you were to receive, what you were supposed to perform for those services.Leonard: I understand the full contract and the services that I had to do. Like I said, I don't deal with the conspiracies or the clickbait analysts or journalism that's going on. So that's what it is.
Shelburne: Well, I think the allegation was that you didn't perform any services for them. Is that accurate, or did you do things for them?
Leonard: I don't think it's accurate. But it's old. This is all new to you guys. The company went bankrupt a while ago, so we already knew this was going to happen.
Shelburne: You were named as the largest creditor in the bankruptcy filing. Did you actually get the money that was owed to you in the contract?
Leonard: No. But the company went belly up. It was fraud, as everybody knows. If you want any more questions or more details about that company, you need to ask the owner or whoever else is involved in the fraud that went on, right?Shelburne: I think they said they owed you $7 million or something, right?
Leonard: I'm not sure, I gotta look back at the books. But nah, it's more that that for sure.
Shelburne: Do you have any idea of how much you actually made on that?
Leonard: No, it was two, three, four years ago.
And that was the end of Leonard's engagement with this topic, at least for the day. The fact that Leonard's most substantive exchange was with Shelburne does not feel like a coincidence; she also held a studio interview with Clippers owner Steve Ballmer right after the news broke. That interaction, like this one, seemed designed to allow her interlocutor to clear the air and return to normalcy.
Ballmer's approach was a little sweatier and indignant, and Leonard's quieter and evasive. The star forward's defense, which could have been exhaustively coached over the last four weeks, could be encapsulated by "fake news" and "it was a long time ago." But Leonard has never been the type to clear up with a loud, decisive public statement. We'll probably get various remixes of those same non-answers until the questions stop, or another update to the saga proves impossible to dismiss.
