You’re probably familiar with the…let’s go with passive aggressive approach the Clippers went with which to prevent then-free agent and NBA 3rd Team DeAndre Jordan from penning his agreed upon deal with the Dallas Mavericks back in 2015. What you might be less familiar with? Per Brad Turner of the L.A. Times, the Clippers offered Jordan a $200,000 endorsement deal with Lexus that the league eventually ruled violated their anti-circumvention rules.

The violation involved a presentation made by the Clippers to free agent DeAndre Jordan on July 2 that improperly included a potential third-party endorsement opportunity for the player. While the NBA’s investigation ultimately concluded that the presentation of this opportunity had no impact on Jordan’s decision to re-sign with the Clippers, the team’s conduct nevertheless violated the league’s anti-circumvention rules.

The NBA’s anti-circumvention rules prohibit teams from, among other things, providing or arranging for others to provide any form of compensation to a player unless such compensation is included in a player contract or otherwise expressly permitted under the CBA.

The team was fined about $250,000 and that was the end of it besides the bitter grumbling of Dallas fans who were the team that ultimately got screwed in the whole proceedings. Wait, why does that sound…familiar?

So why does this matter? Well, if the little brother of L.A. is found to be guilty, this would provide much higher ground from with which to hit the Clippers with a harsher penalty as repeat offenders. They clearly did not learn from that past incident and it’s still up in the air if that 2nd sponsorship that the league’s investigation discovered is connected in any way to the football club in Rhode Island that Pablo uncovered Kawhi Leonard’s connections to very recently. The league’s integrity matters and if there’s anything to take away from the Jordan dealing, it’s that the Clippers were not dissuaded from the punishment doled out to them. A simple fine means nothing for Ballmer so a much larger hammer needs to fall for this to deter him or other owners from turning the NBA into the MLB. The ball’s in Silver’s court for how he wants to wield those ever so broad powers, up to and including a lifetime ban for Stevey, Uncle Dennis and Lawrence Frank.

One thing we can all be sure of? \(28 million (The amount in the Kawhi/Aspiration scandal) is substantially more than \)200,000 even accounting for the cap space for 2015 vs. 2024. So if nothing else, the punishment lobbied against them financially should be a wee bit more than $250K this time around.