The NBA stripped the Los Angeles Clippers of five first-round picks from 2029 through 2033, fined the club $30 million, and banned owner Steve Ballmer from league and team activities for a year after an independent investigation found salary-cap circumvention around Kawhi Leonard. [1] [2] The announcement is dated September 2 in New York. Thursday's Guardian asks whether that sum tames the owner class. [3] Commissioner Adam Silver called the violations flagrant. The league and the players' union, the NBA said, "have entered into an agreement confirming these penalties are final and binding on all parties." [1] The Clippers said they will fight in arbitration. [2] [3] Those two sentences do not yet agree.

July 30 this paper reported that Leonard's Toronto trade was a completed transaction suspended by an open compliance review, with no enforcement instrument on the record. Thursday there is a penalty sheet. The trade still is not a done deal. The Guardian, citing ESPN, said the previously announced Clippers-Raptors trade is expected to go through within days, with Toronto sending Brandon Ingram, Gradey Dick, two firsts, two seconds, and a pick swap to Los Angeles. [3] Do not write that it is dead. Do not write that it is done.

Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz found that the Clippers initiated off-court income between Leonard and four companies doing business with the team — Aspiration Partners, Boingo Wireless, Daktronics, and Lockton Insurance — facilitated the endorsement deals, induced the companies with team business, paid personal expenses, and failed to report solicitations made through Leonard's then-manager, Dennis Robertson. [1] The Clippers, the league noted, were a prior offender of the circumvention rules. [1] Gillian Zucker, president of business operations, was suspended without pay for a year, including for false and misleading statements to investigators. Lawrence Frank, president of basketball operations, was suspended without pay for six months. Leonard was assessed $700,000. Robertson was banned from NBA business for five years. The club sits under five years of league monitoring. [1]

Ballmer bought the Clippers for $2 billion in 2014 after Donald Sterling's lifetime ban. He built Intuit Dome in Inglewood, opened in 2024, the club's first home of its own since San Diego in 1984, with a halo scoreboard and a wall of supporters. [3] His fortune, Forbes's figure in the Guardian, is $152.7 billion. [2] [3] Thirty million is not confiscatory against that number. It is a banner the Clippers can hang. After trading James Harden and Ivica Zubac, and with Leonard likely gone, the franchise has no natural first-round pick from 2029 through 2033. [3] Leonard is due $50 million in salary this season. [2] The club sent Silver a letter saying it is "exploring every legal remedy." [3] Silver said the collectively bargained compensation system is "a fundamental component of the basketball competition," and that he was "deeply disappointed by the flagrant violations of our rules and by the Clippers' institutional and leadership failures." [1] [2] The club "vehemently reject[s] the NBA's findings," calling them "the result of a heavily biased investigation seeking to justify a predetermined narrative rather than facts and evidence," and said it looked "forward to an ethical and impartial arbitration process." [2] Leonard, through his agent, said he entered the contracts in good faith and took "full responsibility for lapses in judgment by people within my inner circle." [2]

Pablo Torre's reporting last year, cited by the Guardian, alleged a $28 million no-show Aspiration deal, with a clause that voided the contract if Leonard left the Clippers. [2] [3] Wachtell also found an Aspiration jersey patch and a Daktronics scoreboard among the business offered to induce the endorsements. [3] The NBA said Wachtell continues to receive information and that the league will consider further action as appropriate. [1] Stephen Noh, quoted in the Guardian from Sporting News, wrote that if the league had merely given "a finger wag, then other deep-pocketed ownership groups would surely have started their own cap circumvention techniques." [3] X will file vindication and a rounding-error joke. NBA PR will file the harshest punishment in league history. A year-long probe produced penalties the union signed as binding and a club that still wants a hearing. Toronto remains on hold until someone actually closes it.

-- AMARA OKONKWO, Lagos