For all the fulminations about the million-ton craphammer dropped on the Los Angeles Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer for trying to evade the NBA salary cap, almost nobody has yet identified the situation as the entertainment bonanza it is about to become.
Yes, it's time for another edition of the game show to end all game shows, and maybe also to end everything else: Billionaires Eating Billionaires. You've seen it, because it airs reruns on basically every channel. A bunch of insanely wealthy people get in their feelings about another colossally wealthy person who has gone rogue on the herd, and lash out accordingly; the gameplay generally unfolds as a series of lawyergasms across the continent and ends with some competitors going home naked and battered, all of it richly deserved. It's Turbo Survivor, only with bloody retributions handed out to all the contestants, even the winners, as well as the hosts and production team; even the intrepid team of reporters and researchers who started all this hilarity a year ago will take home a black eye for their trouble.
That last group is Team Torre, named for its front man, Pablo Torre, whose name is on the door of the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast. It was that program's collective team of researchers and newsjackals who found a disgruntled insider willing not only to expose the salary-cap games being played by the Clippers, but to provide the first few documents of proof that ultimately led to Ballmer and the Clippers being publicly pantsed for paying Kawhi Leonard under multiple tables. They will be part of the legal mess about to unfold—the heated letter the Clippers sent to the league after Wednesday's punishment came down sniffily referred to the malfeasance Torre et al. exposed as "podcast allegations"—and unlike all the other combatants, don't necessarily have tens of millions of dollars on hand to pay for it. Their sponsors, Meadowlark Media and through them DraftKings, do. So that'll be a hoot, too.
But here's where the real fun starts. Ballmer, through his own gaggle of legal predators, seems ready to fight back and become that rarest of franchise operators: a class traitor, albeit a self-interested and self-justifying one, with the bankroll and self-importance to make Jimmy Dolan look like a go-along/get-along guy. So think Billionaires Eating Billionaires: Tournament Of Champions.
You may have noticed that the words "Adam" and "Silver" have not been mentioned until just now. That is because Silver is not really anything other than an unsettling piñata at the bigger party. Yes, Silver is the league's commissioner, which means that he serves all the league's owners. As such, he is no more positioned to punish any one of them on his own than he is to win a pie-eating contest. Anyone who frames what is about to come as Ballmer v. Silver is being deliberately obtuse, or just now revealing themselves as authentically obtuse. Silver's in the conference room the same way that big oak table is: sitting and watching and getting scratched up and spilled on, a shiny surface that more important figures will pound on for emphasis.
The sleazy-funny particulars aside, this story and the extraordinary penalty the Clippers and Ballmer received are ultimately about a group of the other 29 franchise operators, maybe even all of them, policing their cohort's conduct. Some of those owners helped midwife Ballmer into the group 12 years ago when Donald Sterling finally disgraced his way out of ownership. They are getting theirs back, not because they all wanted Leonard to play on their team—that would mean competing for a prize, which few of them prioritize above collecting their revenues—but because Ballmer unclogged his nostrils on the salary cap, which is both practically and conceptually the grand underpinning of their profitability. The cap, as vile as it is, allows the NBA's owners to pretend to trust each other with the expenses. Without it they become a pack of jackals turning in on each other, and doing the sort of too-clever rich-guy workaround stuff that the Clippers did in this case. Like we said, Billionaires Eating Billionaires: The Grand Finale.
As a viewing opportunity, what follows could be good, and there's a real possibility that many or even most of the people involved will get some version of what's coming to them. But none of this will be fun for the people covering it, because the insiders won't be able to use their text buddies in the player-agent community to guide them to illusory scoops, and almost none of them cover the owners as obsessively as they do the free-agent market. The owners are the only ones in the NBA who can do what they do in secret, and that's one more way in which the players don't control the league, not even LeBron James.
That is a fancy way of saying that we already know Leonard's role in all this—having an uncle who thought he was getting over on everyone, and also taking some money for doing nothing, which if you think about it is not that different than taking money from the Clippers in general—but we don't know which owners were spoiling for a fight with Ballmer. We barely know the actors who brought Ballmer into the fold 12 years ago, though guesses have included San Antonio's Peter Holt, Detroit's Tom Gores, and Miami's Micky Arison. Ballmer had the money to buy Sterling out with cash, and that decades-overdue transaction, when it finally happened, took the time it takes for a bird to engage its third eyelid. When this cohort knows what it wants, that thing tends to happen very quickly.
Ballmer, for his part, surely saw the league as indebted to him and his whims, which led him to realize that he needed to make his new toy desirable to future employees. The Clippers as a brand are a profitable business but an artistic disaster, and like everyone else in the Forbes Top Nine, Ballmer is a competitive cuss dead set on getting his own way and happy to pick his teeth with the femurs of those who serve as obstacles.
About that: Ballmer is rich enough to buy out the next five richest owners in the league (Miriam Adelson, Rogers Communications, Robert Pera, Dan Gilbert, and some child in the Stan Kroenke family) and still keep his fleet of yachts, or owners six through 29 (if you want to subscribe at Defector's Maniac tier, we'll type them all for you) and still keep his portfolio of European castles. Ballmer can't get 'em all, is the point, but he'd give it a damned fine try. And he seems ready for a fight with whoever it is that decided to crotch-kick his team after all he did for them, which in a dozen years amounts to getting rid of Sterling, jacking up franchise valuations, and setting a new standard for arena toilet density.
And what do we get? The potential immolation of a sports league we continue to enjoy despite the decay therein, at the whim of billionaires we continue to loathe. If Ballmer loses, he can either eat the poop sandwich and claim it tastes like lobster ravioli, or put the team up for sale to some other desperate gullibillionaire; there are currently 3,400-some-odd of them, so finding a sucker shouldn't be hard. And if he gets away with it—and those five first-round picks are gone, but there will be court cases to come—then there effectively is no more NBA salary cap, at least unless/until the owners bludgeon the union into submission at the next CBA. Resale prices for franchises will, we can assume, be impacted commensurately. Voila! The bubble bursts!
Or maybe we fast-forward to the end, where everyone turns on everyone else in a Mardi Gras of mayhem. All we can do, ultimately, is hope for a frenzied contest of late-stage capitalism v. old-timey cannibalism rivaled most recently by the Russian oligarchs who toppled the Soviet Union. With a suitably high casualty count, your favorite team just might have a better chance to win a championship, which may or may not exist.
