In September 2025 the NBA hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to investigate the Los Angeles Clippers for potential salary cap circumvention after Pablo Torre Finds Out reported that the team had arranged a no-show endorsement deal for Kawhi Leonard with a fraudulent tree-planting company called Aspiration. On June 30, 2026, the Clippers agreed to trade Leonard to the Toronto Raptors. That trade is now on hold because, somehow, the aforementioned investigation is still ongoing.
On Thursday both the Clippers and Raptors released statements saying their trade is being put on pause. The Raptors' statement said that the reason for the delay is that the NBA informed them that they would "assume the risk of any potential outcome of the investigation impacting Kawhi." This is an interesting development for a few reasons, the first being that the NBA's warning to the Raptors would seem to indicate that a suspension might be coming Leonard's way before the start of the season. The other reason is that it really makes you wonder what the fuck Adam Silver is doing every day.
The Aspiration investigation has been going on for nearly a year at this point, and it has dragged on for so long that it is now fucking up the offseason for teams that had nothing to do with it. The Raptors were well into a summer making plans to go into next season with a team built around Leonard, and now they are stuck waiting around to see if they will A) have to cancel that trade and change their plans on the fly or B) trade for a player who is going to miss a significant number of games. Why couldn't the NBA have tipped the Raptors off about this 10 days ago, when the trade was first reported? For that matter, why didn't the league just issue a warning to all teams about Leonard's status at the beginning of the summer, to prevent an awkward situation like this one? What are Brandon Ingram and Gradey Dick, the two players Toronto wanted to send to Los Angeles in the trade, supposed to do now? These guys need to figure out where they are going to be living and working for the season.
At this point, the NBA's endless investigation into the Aspiration scandal has become more embarrassing for the league than the scandal itself. At worst, the Clippers found a creative way to pay a player something closer to fair-market value instead of participating in the league's artificial wage-suppression scheme. Not only has it taken the league 10 months to answer a relatively simple question about what the Clippers did or didn't do; it's now doing stuff like calling up the Raptors 10 days after they announced a trade to say Uhhh, actually you might want to hold off on that because, uhhhh, some stuff might happen. Why should anyone care about following all of the league's rules if it's as bumbling and disorganized as this?
