The owner of Clippers Steve Ballmer is confident that he will be canceled in the NBA Kawhi Leonard probe: “I welcome the investigations”
If the owner of Los Angeles Clippers, Steve Ballmer, is nervous for the NBA, examining if he has given Kawhi Leonard inadmissible benefits during his free agency, Ballmer does not show him. Ballmer said Tuesday to accommodate the NBA investigations on the situation.
Ballmer made those comments to the Drive event of the Sports Business Journal, in which he was an speaker in the foreground. When he was asked about the situation, Ballmer said he was frankly and that the NBA will discover that the relationship of the Clippers with the aspiration and the Leonard relationship with the aspiration were “independent”.
Ballmer added that he is “quite confident … that we respected the rules” and said he welcomes the investigations of the NBA because “he will get the facts out there”.
Announcement
Ballmer, The Clippers and Leonard were investigated by the NBA after reports emerged by suggesting a company in which Ballmer hit Leonard $ 28 million for “works without shows” presumably as a way to evade the NBA salary limit.
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According to reports, that company, the aspiration, treated Leonard’s payments as a critical priority, reaching the point of paying Leonard $ 1.75 million despite the company was in approximate form. The company made that payment shortly after the co -owner of Clippers Dennis Wong has invested $ 1.99 million in aspiration.
Those connections were discovered by the journalist Pablo Torre. While Torre did not find direct tests that showed that the Clippers and Ballmer used the aspiration as a way to pay Leonard to circumvent the limit of the salary, Torre has connected enough points to turn on the investigations of the NBA on the situation.
Announcement
Following those revelations, both Ballmer and the Clippers denied the accusations, saying that Ballmer was defrauding from aspiration and that the team and Ballmer had “no supervision” in the independent approval agreement of Leonard with the aspiration.
Ballmer reiterated those comments on Tuesday and implied that the NBA would not find anything suspicious with his investigations. The League originally investigated Leonard’s free agency in 2019, after it was said that his uncle, Dennis Robertson, asked the teams of inadmissible benefits while those teams courted Leonard. The League found no evidence that the Clippers have granted illegal benefits to Leonard at the time of that original investigation.
Announcement
Commissioner NBA Adam Silver spoke of the Leonard investigation last week, stating that the NBA would need strong evidence to issue punishments against Ballmer and Clippers. Tuesday he was also asked for the scandal and said he had already heard of aspiration before – which is different from what he said a week earlier.
“If I said I had never heard of it, I meant in the context of the accusations here,” Silver said at the Front Office Sports. “I was certainly aware of the brand.”
That interview came after Pablo Torre gave a copy of the “sponsorship agreement” of aspiration, which is something that must be approved by the League.
While Silver tried to clean things on Tuesday evening, Ballmer’s comments on Tuesday indicate that he believes that the League will discover that the Clippers acted appropriately during and after Leonard’s free agency.