Exactly this. The Big Six may not explicitly call the shots in the PL, but they have their thumbs on the scale so much that they may as well.

The closest the NBA may have is the historical legacy of the Celtics and Lakers, but even then, if those two were to team up against the rest of the league, it would go nowhere.

Kings were in the playoffs as a third seed three years ago.

In Europe, the perennial bad teams fall out of the major league level and have to earn their way back to the major league.

The culture is entirely different. Top 4ish teams from each league compete for championships every year because of the money difference mostly. Fans accepted this long ago, so mid table fans know they’ll stay there.

NBA at least cycles contenders within its league and every team has a chance to win a title with smart management.

You can bring a smart management to a team like West Ham(sorry West Ham fans) all you like, they won’t win a title.

Purely from a micro level busyness standpoint, sure.

But the health of the league and the interest of the fans matters.

The MLB and NBA are just so different in parity and star impact it’s not even funny. You can’t really go 1 to 1 on what works. An MLB team can just get hot at the right time and win a chip despiste ownership so fans will keep tuning in. It’s not the same for the NBA, competitive balance matters a hell of a lot more.

I’m down to find ways to punish shitty teams that tank year over year but removing the draft and or removing caps is not it. I’d probably completely tune out of this sport my interests is already waning due to shit like the clippers drama and flopping / rewarding foul bating.

We’re not talking about future hypotheticals, we’re talking about what is happening/has happened.

The NBA has by far the LEAST parity in American big 4 sports and it shows. It’s not good for the sport, and the salary cap CLEARLY isn’t solving/fixing the problem. The NFL and NHL are doing fine with maintaining parity with their cap. MLB has done a fine job maintaining parity with no cap.

Having a cap on salary or not doesn’t suddenly fix problems.

Lol this is absolute nonsense.

There are 15 roster spots on each team and many many more players than that.

Teams already don’t invest endlessly to ensure success. There is no limit to ownership investment in staff, etc, but not every team has top tier facilities, state of the art scouting and things like that. 

If a team can be assured that their franchise is still well valued without taking the plunge, I think owners will be less angry than the public thinks/hopes. 

Putting it one way, is Memphis’ ownership going to be overly pissed they keep losing out on top tier players in FA because the Clips offer incentives? Maybe not if the league say “your team’s valuation just went up by 1.2bn and here’s some revenue share.” 

If anything, I think the league punishes Clips just enough publicly to send a message and then goes hard on the player to try and deter this from the player end.

There’s levels to this. There’s the owner giving the star player his credit card and buying dinner for the team, there’s a free car and/or house to use and then there’s a sham business funnelling millions to a player, to the point where the Feds are involved.

And no one wants the feds involved. (especially pre-Bondi)

You are way underestimating how much a billion dollars is.

Check out this visualization: https://eattherichtextformat.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

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I’m not Ballmer’s lawyer I’m just seeing how Pablo twists the narrative.

This is basically how Pablo’s “reporting” works.

He’d start by doing a deep dive into me and find the one of my most popular posts of all time was on the fantasy basketball subreddit where I talked about creating a team dynasty team. He’d ask his co-host to flip over the page and read the name of the team … the “Bellevue Leprechauns”.

He’d find this curious, so he’d see what else I’ve posted about “Bellevue”. He’d find other posts mentioning I live in the Seattle area and conclude it was a reference to where I lived = Bellevue, Washington.

From there he’d come across a post from 5 years ago where I talked about my local movie theater. He’d have his co-host read the highlighted quote out loud:

“my local Cinemark theater is awesome. 21+ with reserved reclining seats, in-seat service with diner/alcohol… it’s a fantastic experience and a solid entertainment destination that is relatively cheap.”

From there, Pablo would pull up Google maps and see how many Cinemark theaters there were in Bellevue Washington. He’d find that there are only two. One a standard IMAX theater and another, newer one, called “Cinemark Reserve” which is 21+. He’d find this curious.

He’d see that Cinemark Reserve is located at 500 Bellevue Way NE. From there he’d look at public record and deduce that that building, a sister property to Lincoln Square tower, was only finished 10 years ago and is called “400 Lincoln Square”. He’d tell his co-hosts you aren’t going to believe what else is at 400 Lincoln Square and he’d show you - after the commercial break.

After a brief recap, he’d have them flip over the final page. An article from 2015. He’d have them read it out loud: Source: Ballmer leasing 30th floor of new Lincoln Square tower

Turns out, Steve Ballmer for over a decade has been leasing the entire top floor of 400 Lincoln Square.

Ah yes, it just so happens that LarBrd33, who has been “coincidentally” defending Steve Ballmer happens to live in the exact same town as Steve and frequently goes to a movie theater that just so happens to be in the exact same building as Steve Ballmer’s 25,000 sq ft personal office.

He’d build an entire 1 hour podcast over this and claim it proved the Clippers circumvented the salary cap.

Days later he’d post another hour long podcast with new shocking information he’s discovered. An additional deep-dive into LarBrd33 showed that two years ago he posted on the Antiques subreddit asking if they had tips for finding a respectable auction house as part of an estate sale. Where was this estate sale, you might ask? Flip over the next page and read LarBrd33’s quote: “The place is in Brentwood Los Angeles.”

Ah yes, LarBrd33 just so happens to have recently owned property in none other than Los Angeles. What else happens to be in Los Angeles?… the Clippers, perhaps? But Pablo’s not done. He’d do a deeper dive into Brentwood, specifically. Finding that it happens to be the same neighborhood that NBA players like LeBron James live in. He’d find that curious. Going deeper, he’d find that Kawhi Leonard’s home is in the Pacific Palisades… which happens to be right next to Brentwood.

If that wasn’t enough Pablo would come back 3 months later with a new hour long episode. Half would be a recap of stuff already covered The rest would be about my buddy Mike. A public records search would show that Mike and I were roommates in 2005. Pablo would find Mike’s old social posts admitting he worked at a Bellevue restaurant where he served Steve Ballmer a few times. A check of our Linkedins would show that only 4 years later in 2009, both Mike and I worked for the same Microsoft vendor… Microsoft, of course, a company Ballmer was CEO of until 2014… and if Pablo dug deeper he’d find that as of 2026, Mike runs an agency where Microsoft remains one of his largest clients and I most recently worked for a startup founded by former Microsoft execs.

Easy to spin this into some narrative that LarBrd33 and his associates have had a relationship with Ballmer dating back to early as 2005 and this is more proof of cap circumvention. Of course, that’s absolutely not the case. It’s all just a bunch of random coincidences. I have nothing to do with Steve Ballmer, but FWIW I did once take a piss next to him in an empty bathroom at that Cinemark theater.

Yes because Rakuten didn’t immediately fail as a company within weeks of signing Steph’s endorsement deal… which is also why the warriors and Steph keep getting paid while the clippers/Kawhi pretty immediately didn’t.  

This entire premise of 50 mil in/50 mil out pretty much immediately falls apart when you acknowledge that Kawhi only ever got paid a few mil dollars 

And we don’t know what Kawhi was doing for Sanberg privately that wouldn’t appear in social posts.  That’s something maybe the investigation will turn up.  If Cuban is right that it was mostly “gladhanding” of Sanberg introducing his clients/investors to Kawhi at clippers games and getting photos/autographs for them, there’s probably proof of that Pablo wouldn’t have found on Twitter. 

No. I don’t have a source for the contract value that’s just speculation I’ve seen. Know why? Because these kind of details aren’t typically publicly disclosed. Neither Steph or Rakuten has to inform the league of their agreement. He could be making 20 mil per year for all we know. This might be a common arrangement.

The only reason the Kawhi contract came to light was because Aspiration was found to be fraudulent and some of these details became public record. Pablo built his narrative from there. But my overall point is that the agreement Kawhi had with Joe Sanberg may have in fact been perfectly legitimate and normal in the context of Aspiration having a 300 mil endorsement deal with the Clippers. And mostly this is a timing thing where the company went to shit within weeks of the contract signing. Perhaps had the company stayed in business, Kawhi would have actually been paid 7 mil per year (he only was paid a fraction of it) and he would have done something publicly we’d be able to point to. But pretty quickly Aspiration was in the toilet and the Clippers cut ties, because bills weren’t being paid.