Commentary: The NBA report on the Ballmer/Clippers scandal shows it was even worse than you thought

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Set us as preferred One rule I’ve developed in years of writing about financial scandals is that, as bad as a scheme appears at first, it’s more likely than not that the facts will turn out to be nastier than they appeared at first.Case in point: The scandal swirling around the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Assn.

and their billionaire owner, former Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer.The story was initially broken one year ago by sports podcaster Pablo Torre, who reported on a suspect endorsement deal between a sustainability company named Aspiration and All-Star forward Kawhi Leonard that smelled like an attempt to circumvent the NBA’s strict salary cap.

(Torre won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.)I have no idea why we’d do this.— Aspiration executive questioning its “endorsement” deal with Kawhi LeonardBy Sept.2, when the NBA issued a series of nuclear sanctions against the team and Ballmer, it had become much bigger.

The team, according to an investigative report the league released, actually orchestrated endorsement deals for Leonard with four companies that had been angling for business arrangements with the team, not just one, and took steps to hide the deals from public view.Because of the extent to which these deals violated league rules and perhaps because the Clippers are repeat offenders (they were fined $250,000 in 2015 for a similar endorsement scheme involving then-free agent DeAndre Jordan), the league hit the team with its maximum penalties.Commentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize winner.

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