Stephen A Smith - “The Clippers are in a world of trouble… It should be entertained that Kawhi Leonard should be banned for a year.”
If Kawhi is banned for a year then Ballmer should be banned for life.
Also ban SAS from TV because he sucks
It’s insanity that he is still constantly on the airwaves.
he’s incredibly popular. One of his personal YouTube channel vids got into my recommended so I looked through his channel and there were like 50+ videos of at least half a million views just from the past couple years. Not even just sports either there was also politics and pop culture content. There’s a whole different world out there lol
He’s ESPNs highest paid employee for a reason despite what Reddit may think he’s worth. They aren’t paying him 20+ million a year just for fun
I fucking hate ESPN and their take culture
I just hope it isn’t sustainable. I feel like they’ve eroded their reputation with this too much and now that there are more and more options for sports media they will begin to see a decline. What’s sustaining them is their reach, but they’re training their viewers to just tune out when this stuff is shoved down their throats.
The ESPN many of us grew up with hasn’t really existed in a decade. Hot-take culture sells. I just hope they don’t start making their analysts stream too lol.
Marketing figured out that enraging people sells more than anything so we’ve got a world that constantly tries to make people as angry as possible for engagement.
Thankfully, I can’t imagine any downsides to a civilization that is constantly angry.
Yeah they lost me a long time ago. I don’t watch sports to watch ugly dorks yell at each other about which players legacy is more relevant.
I mean Reddit generally says his opinions and personality are garbage, and they’re correct, we just happen to live in an era where companies have discovered misleading and inflaming people is the best way to drive engagement. It’s the fact that he’s so terribly inaccurate and annoying that actually makes him worth that money.
Been like that for years.
We just need to gut Fox, MSNBC and ESPN.
Get back to actual reporting.
Reporting is really expensive and hard to do. Takes, and in particular hot ones, are pennies on the dollar and can be delivered instantly.
Reddit is full of morons.
They say why is this guy paid or still on the air while participating in a forum discussing his takes.
He’s just what ESPN wants. He’s controversial and promotes discussions. Sometimes I can listen to him, but, when he gets on particular rants I have to tune him out.
Yeah I’m not a big Stephan A fan, and particularly not at all a fan of him on first take(I think debate shows are stupid as hell and basically entirely clickbait). But I do understand how big of a star he is and how extremely popular he is. I actually don’t mind him on other formats like radio, and it’s pretty obvious how talented he is. I listened to a Simmons podcast a few years ago when he had Stephen A on and he sounded like a completely different person than he does on first take and it was actually a super good interview.
Also once spoke to a woman who worked in ad sales for ESPN radio and when he was leaving his radio show all the executives were shitting their pants because he was generating all the ratings for the station basically carrying their whole operation.
Monkey’s paw curls
Steven A is no longer on TV but he (unfortunately) successfully runs for president
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but at least he wouldn’t be worse than what we have now
It would reignite the war on drugs as he tries to get Americans to “Stay off the weeeeeeeeduh”
We are literally all here talking about him.
The suits don’t care if he gets clicks/views because people love him or people hate him.
San Antonio Spurs did nothing wrong
Ehhhh…ban them anyway.
Instructions unclear, Spurs games to be broadcasted in described video, by Tim Duncan.
Just limit him to daytime soaps.
I support all 3 ideas.
Mark Cuban looks like a gigantic idiot defending Balmers scam
Cuban had never minded looking stupid, I appreciate that about him.
Never forget letting Steve Nash walk so he could give Erick Dampier 65 mil. Dampier said he’s the second best center in the league behind Shaq. Then Shaq called him Ericka Dampier.
I’d be willing to bet it’s because every owner is doing this in some capacity. If Silver has ANY sense in him he’ll take a page from Stern’s handling of the ref gambling scandal and treat Balmer like a rogue owner who broke the rules to distract from the entire NBA doing this
Ballmer is the chair of the league audit committee too, lol. So he would know the exact rules and how to circumvent them with precision. This is like extreme backstabbery of Ballmer against the league.
I genuinely don’t believe anybody is doing anything to this extent.
Do I believe teams kick small potatoes endorsement deals to players all the time? Especially lesser paid guys? Yes, absolutely. But there’s a big fuzzy grey area there that’s impossible to police.
This? This is all just blatant cap runarounds for a guy already getting paid top dollar. He most likely just wanted to stay in Toronto and Ballmer arranged another $100M or whatever in these fake deals to convince Kawhi otherwise.
That’s the crazy part about it. If Kawhi even half assed some endorsement stuff for those companies, this is all much harder to catch him for.
It’s bananas he didn’t just have an intern pound out a few ad tweets or something.
It’s because he did it through the documentary. Makes perfect sense he’d be trying to dust this under the rug.
Forced to sell the team. His wealth and single-handed ability to prop the league up be damned.
That would be so Ironic because they way he purchased the team the last owner was forced to sell.
Clippers owners keep getting clipped.
It’s important to note the NBA didn’t force the sale. They only banned sterling for life. His wife/ex, through the courts, sold
They didn’t have to everyone knew what the wife would do with the team. They just got an easy way out. Either fight him to force the sale or have his wife say he is crazy and then she sells the team.
Force him to sell the team to Tom Dundon. Force Tom Dundon to sell the Blazers to someone else, at his cost. Win win.
Clippers probably worth too much.
I know this follows zero rules or reasonable logic, but sonafabitch I’m in
How about banning both for life honestly, it’s that big of a scandal everyone involved should be kicked out of the league. Kawhi is anything but innocent just like Ballmer
I tend to agree. This is really not that much different than a scandal involving gambling. If everyone isn’t playing by the same rules then the league is rigged.
It’s an insane precedent to set though, if they can’t prove Ballmer knew about it. We all know he did, but proof is important.
Otherwise a minority owner who wants the majority out could just do the same thing
At this point, even if the proverbial smoking gun doesn’t exist that would unambiguously tie this directly to him, it still occurred under his leadership which makes him indirectly liable.
American society has degraded to the point where we unironically believe that the (CEO/owner/head coach/whoever is in charge) can’t be held liable for their organization’s misdeeds unless you catch them in the act of ordering their employees to do illegal shit
Commissioners are loathe to do anything to owners because it sets the “look what I can do to your investment” precedent for other owners
It’s all fun and games in the Reddit comments, but we’re talking huge business here and the commissioner works for the owners, and Ballmer spends on his team and built his own stadium
(Not to mention would go nuclear with lawyers)
Silver 100% wants this swept under the rug and to just move on (they never won anything!)
He mentions Ballmer should be banned for a year. I don’t know how you ban an owner and what that would even look like. Guess he thinks Ballmer should just be forced to sublet the team for anyear
Owners have been suspended before.
This is correct… Steinbrenner being the famous one. I think Marge Schott from the Reds was ban .. not sure
Glen Taylor from the Timberwolves and Robert Sarver from the Suns are 2 NBA owners I remember being suspended in addition to Donald Sterling’s lifetime ban.
In 2019 a warriors minority owner was suspended a year for shoving Lowry
A second Adam Silver ban hammer has hit the Clippers ownership.
That won’t happen sadly Balmer is too rich the league wants him
Ngl the Clippers having their owner banned for life every decade would be a pretty funny recurring bit. Excited to see what the next owner gets up to if this happens (probably wont tho)
Ballmer did this stuff for a high school basketball team in the Seattle area before going onto the NBA post Microsoft
Memo to Steve Ballmer | Cascade PBS
https://www.cascadepbs.org/tech/2014/08/steve-ballmer-lakeside-school-basketball-clippers/
The only reason this is being dragged out the way it is is cause Balmer has the resources to expose the other owners of possibly doing the same tactics to circumvent the salary cap and Silver can’t let that happen
He’ll probably get a slap on the wrist at most but Kawhi is finished
Eh, Kawhi AND Ballmer banned for life is better.
Ban em both for life for all I give a fuck
Posted in 260p because SAS deserves nothing more.
Shouldn’t post SAS at all.
What did Tim Duncan and David Robinson do to deserve this?
/s
I will not stand for this wemby erasure
Will you not sit for it either? Or will you not crouch for it?
As an American I shall lean on something
he’s not wrong here
then dont post the bozo at all
It’s always so weird seeing you pop up outside of PF Chang’s.
How spicy would you like your Chang Sauce?
Epic reddit moment. You sure showed him
I turned my wifi off to check if it was moving slow.
Very difficult for me to believe I just upvoted an sas post. Priest and holy water en route.
Best Silver can do is docking a 2031 2nd round pick
The Clippers will be mandated to get a new scoreboard.
Regular ass scoreboard
Just a couple of dudes in the rafters with a chalkboard.
Kawhi and Ballmer in the rafters with a chalkboard
Every time they score there should be a kawhi laugh
i don’t wanna ever read adam silver and docking in the same sentence
Because everyone knows cap circumvention deals worth tens of millions of dollars are punished by 1⁄3 of a second round pick every infraction.
If taking money offered under the table is bad, offering it in the first place is just as bad if not worse.
That’s what gets me most about this dilemma lol
Kawhi should be punished for sure but people overlook this simple fact
An employee making wild work demands and under the table side deals can easily be denied by the employer
Kawhi had leverage at the time but he’s not a mob boss, they could have easily said no just like the Raptors and Lakers told them no
Clippers said yes and ran with it
They should get most of the punishment imo
Where do you get that people are overlooking that the clips should face punishment? I see that point being made constantly.
Someone actually made a compilation of talking heads specifically trying to downplay Ballmer’s involvement and placing the majority of the blame on Kawhi. I can’t remember the post title but it was def a thing
Shit, here’s a compilation of just Stephen A Smith showing how he has nothing but praise and sympathy for Ballmer while laying all of the blame on Kawhi.
I don’t think people are saying that the Clips should get off Scot-free.
I think people are more just skeptical that justice is gonna be done here. Does Silver truly have the balls to come down hard on the one owner who’s worth as much money as all the other owners combined? And if he doesn’t end up coming down harshly enough, it is going to define his tenure.
Well, I do remember a time when the clippers were owned by someone else, I wonder why he sold it?
Yeah that’s bullshit. Clipp’s should absolutely be hammered, but Kawhi and his agent should be banned for life for this shit.
Make it so that no other player even thinks about pulling this crap in the future.
The fact that two other teams knew about this means this was 100% Kawhi’s idea, not the Clippers. He should be the getting hit the hardest.
You have valid points but even if its Kawhi’s idea, the Clippers could easily say no?
If you went to your boss and asked for wild stuff, they’d say no or fire you lol
Essentially Kawhi went to a new organization before being hired making these demands
Can’t make it look like he held a gun to Ballmer and Ballmer was like “okay please don’t hurt me mr Kawhi and Uncle Dennis, here’s all these under the table money”
If you call up Dominos and ask for a free pizza you’re not in trouble with Domino’s, the people that gave it to you are.
I think the CBA already has rules about players and their representatives soliciting impermissible benefits. It’s just not enforced at all.
Well I mean, we know about Uncle Dennis. They may not have come up with Aspiration and Daktronics on their own specifically, but we know damn well they were making demands
Drug dealers get worse punishments than the addicts. The question is who was pushing these schemes to circumvent the cap.
Uncle Dennis?
Don’t spread that bullshit. Dennis works for Kawhi. If it’s coming from that side, Kawhi is the one pushing it. Both should be banned for life for this bs.
Blaming Dennis is trying to frame it so that Kawhi was just taken advantage of, and that’s just pure ignorance if you think that’s what happened.
This feels more like bribery. I feel like the congressman who takes a bribe should be punished harder than the lobbyist who offered the bribe. Especially cause, to answer your question, it was almost certainly Kawhi’s side that first brought this up
In this case I think we can reasonably assume that if it is true, Uncle Dennis had a hand in it from the Kawhi side.
Yes, but the problem is that it’s the richest owner that did this. If it was a regular owner, there would have been suspension, picks taken away before any outside investigation.
People still can’t fathom how much money Ballmer is worth. He can almost buy almost the whole league and still have a few billion left. At one time he was worth enough to buy it out completely and still have like \(10-\)15 billion left.
Everyone involved should be banned for life. Ballmer has to sell.
Kawhi bloody asked for it. He asked the Raptors and he asked the Lakers and both turned him down because apparently we don’t cheat. He is every bit as guilty as Clippers ownership
It’s equally bad. Plus you say they offered it like Kawhi wasn’t literally reported to the NBA for trying to seek it out from multiple other teams
Kawhi is the one who pushed for this and threatened the organisation to go to the Lakers and make the Clippers irrelevant whilst they’re trying to build a new stadium
Oh no, Kawhi will have to play 20 less games this year than he usually does.
HA HA!!! Force him to play 82 would be a crueler punishment.
That’s why voiding his contract entirely makes more sense
Stop, this is the funniest idea!
The way this is technically what happened when he was traded during a contract year to Toronto and won the title lmao. They should ban him like the mlb banned Pete rose and erase all his records from history tbh
*fewer
Silver isn’t going after Ballmer. The league wants no part of that fight.
The other owners don’t want to have their own weird dealings made public.
NBA brought to you by Kalshi and WWE. It’s real, we swear.
It’s still real to me, dammit
Ding ding ding. Don’t look behind the curtain!
so many of these teams are cheap and try to cut as much cost as possible, I have a very hard time believing anything more than like 10 do this kind of thing with any sort of regularity. still way too much but doing it this brazenly is a totally different game
Idk, the smaller market owners are livid about this. The whole point of the supermax and things like that was to allow teams to hold onto their homegrown talent because they can pay more than anyone else. If teams in big markets can just circumvent the cap then that’s meaningless.
Other owners also don’t want Kawhi deals to become the standard to expect moving forward.
I think it’s a mix of:
- Owners want their teams to be good/competitive, don’t like Ballmer cheating the cap so blatantly. Part of them probably want to set a precedent that this is too far
- But also, owners are ruthless rich fucks, most probably somewhere on the psychopath spectrum, see themselves as above the law
The NBA running investigations into owner corruption is inherently flawed, it’s owners investigating themselves. And my guess is their desire to be untouchable wins out. They may not like what Ballmer did, but they like the idea of plebs like Torre having any power over them even less.
Why would the league want no part of that fight?
I understand that Ballmer is one of the few richest people on the planet that can afford a team of the best lawyers money can buy, but so can the NBA.
The NBA has top shelf attorneys on retainer and also has deep pockets to hire more if needed.
At some point there’s a ceiling to the quality of lawyers on each side and what they’re able to do within the law.
I highly doubt this is a unique situation. Just the one to get caught.
The scale of it still has to be unique, given the Lakers, Spurs, and Raptors all reported Uncle Dennis’ lesser demands to the league office instead of just giving him those things. None of those teams, especially the Lakers, are some small market franchise hurting for cash either.
The other owners definitely don’t want to pay players more than the salary cap. They voted for the 2nd apron. Dolan just announced he won’t go into it for a championship team that has made him billions.
It’s just gonna be Man City vs the English football association all over again. He has enough money to make this issue stretch out in court for a long time. The nba are gonna end up in the same situation wishing they never tried to sanction the owner in the first place.
They can go after clippers management, Kawhi etc.
I don’t know if they’ll even do that, Kawhi might get penalized. But Ballmer has the resources to make sure himself and his team doesn’t.
Worst fucking timeline
They won’t go after Kawhi either since the nbpa will aim to protect him. Silver just isn’t going to do anything.
Kawhii actively undermined the NBPA and the CBA by taking money under the table. I understand in a labor dispute the player’s union would step in to support the athlete but Kawhii’s situation is different. At this point if the NBPA steps in to defend Kawhii they would be also shielding him from basically fucking the league over. I doubt they have his back with this one.
Most will be a year or two suspension to save face. Maybe a big fine.
There is 0 chance Ballmer gets shown the door. He’s worth mirth than half the league’s owners combined.
Music to Mark Walters ears.
What about the billionaire that has all the media bought including you?
Tbf in this very clip SAS says Ballmer should be banished for at least a year if it’s true
He should be banned for life, he willingly circumvented to cap using multiple methods
What exactly does that mean for an owner?
Probably jack shit lmao
round the clock surveilance, guy making sure he doesnt even read articles about basketball, complete basketball celibacy
and ban him from grabbing the knees of the people sitting next to him
Instead of a championship ring, Ballmer will be given a Basketball purity ring
It means I’ll be taking ownership of the clippers for a year
That means Ballmer is afraid of being forced to sell and is trying to get out in front of it by telling SAS to float “banishment for a year.”
That’s all this is.
Hey man, the NBA can’t touch the richest owner in the league
The minimum punishment should be:
Balmer sells the team (that won’t happen or be enforced)
So instead he should be banned for 5 years from all team games and activities. Any monetary punishment is useless against Balmer
Clippers lose their 1st AND 2nd round picks for the next 5 years
Kawhi contract is voided and he’s suspended at least a year of not more
Anything less than that is a slap on the wrist
do the clippers even own any of their draft picks for the next 5 years lol
This.
Wonder if the NBA would just strip their draft picks from trades they’ve received. Losing that Indiana pick would be nuts and not having access to current and future drafts for five years would be nuclear but appropriate option imo.
The frustrating part is I had to sit through them tanking part of KG’s prime over the Joe Smith deal, but because it’s MN the league feels it can punish a small market team, meanwhile because it’s a big market team, nothing is really going to happen.. this could also be a Stern Vs Silver thing, but there is absolutely prior history of teams losing picks for this shit.
Obligatory Fuck Glen Taylor. Ultimately they got two first rounders back but losing the other draft assets hurt their ability to truly build around KG, who definitely deserved better, and ultimately set them back for a while.
Hope Silver actually has the balls to punish Clippers from the top down.
What about a cap penalty? Like they have to carry Kawhi’s salary for 5 years but without his services.
Kawhi must play a season with the Saskatoon Mambas before rejoining the NBA.
He and Ballmer should be banned for life.
Strip Kawhi of HOF eligibility
Getting stripped of HOF eligibility when the crime is taking money under the table while the league has a history of HOFs that are known pedophiles and rapists is ridiculous
for better or for worse, there are a ton of deplorable people who have committed crimes in various sports HOFs. what tends to get people stripped of eligibility is if they did something that affected the integrity of the sport (e.g. gambling, cheating, or in this case, circumventing salary caps).
Which is still ridiculous to me but I get your point that it’s relegated to the sport’s integrity
Still having someone say in the future that Kawhi isn’t a HOF cause he circumvented the salary cap while Karl Malone is is fucking weird
I don’t think the NBA has that authority
Love the crazy shit anonymous people say when they’ve got a raging justice boner going lol
This kind of sucks hard for the Raptors.
Tbf they shouldn’t have made the trade before this was wrapped up, like there is assumed risk in trading for someone who is actively being investigated by the NBA
You are right unfortunately. I’m just being a whiny Raps fan.
I didn’t know Debra messing was a raptors fan 😂
that 2019 team won through sheer will and grace
im so sorry
Hey, that’s pretty good
the only innocent party in this getting punished the most.
Ballmer can eat the fine. If he gets banned too he’ll just enjoy his life as a billionaire for a year
Kawhi can eat the fine. If he gets banned he can ice his knees for a year
Clippers lose draft picks but they already dont have a bunch of their picks anyways so the draft was never part of their long-term strategy
Welcome back Ingram and Dick…I guess.
That’d be awkward
Stop it, raptors spent alot of draft picks to bet on an older Kawhi with tons of injuries. The trade getting nixed could easily end up saving the raptors from themselves.
After Kawhi’s suspension is over, raptors will be the favorite to land Kawhi in FA without giving up any picks.
The change in tone here when SAS was doing tricks on it for Ballmer at the beginning of the scandal is crazy lmao
“Benefit of the doubt” my ass
Ballmer is now afraid, so he’s having his media goons start talking about “banishment for a year” instead of “banned for life, forced to sell the team.”
That’s all this is
Balmer should be forced to sell the team. Sterling was forced out for less.
Sterling was forced out for less.
bruh
[removed]
The players considered boycotting game 4 of their series against GSW in 2014 because of Donald Sterling. This was out and out a national story that was being talked about in non-basketball circles.
He was. He was contemptible but he wasn’t cheating the rules.
Tbf he’s right
Telling your mistress to stop posting instagram pictures with black guys is a hard one to quantify. Like we all agree it’s messed up but he had a pretty solid “air bud” there’s no rule that says I can’t do that defense.
Reddit in a nutshell
idk chief having an actively racist owner in black dominated sport is as worse as this lol
What would banishment of an owner for a year even mean? Like that he can’t attend games? Big whoop
Well, i mean lets go over all the reasonable options you can apply to an owner:
Monetary fine? Big whoop. We know how those go. What do you fine them, 500 million? He is worth over 150 billion.
Banned from team games and activities? Yeah thats probably the harshest punishment you can reasonably give an owner i guess.
Force him to sell the team? I mean that hurts, but he bought the team for 2 billion and forbes has the clippers estimated worth around 7 billion. So, “we are going to force you to sell for a 5 billion dollar profit”
I’m far from a legal expert, but I’d imagine forcing a billionaire to sell his team would quickly spiral into a legal shitshow if that impacts what potential buyers now offer etc. With billionaire money, the endless shenanigans they can play in court likely isn’t something the league wants anything to do with. Donald Sterling had technically agreed to sell, I can’t imagine how things play out if Balmer says no.
So Toronto gets screwed by their best player being poached and then screwed again when the league decides to look into it when he’s going back there?
There’s been a bit of hesitation amongst Raps fans to highlight this because we’re historically known for having a bit of a persecution fetish.
That being said… Yeah, it’s a bit ridiculous and I’ll be pretty pissed if we see no reparations from this (which we won’t).
We won a championship and had all of the leverage and reason to convince Kawhi to stay and it was a likely possibility. Then Ballmer and the Clippers breakultiple league rules and (and I can’t stress this enough) cheat in order to pull Kawhi away from us, and away from a very possible repeat championship. Fast forward to now and we’ve got Kawhi coming back to give us another shot at a deep run with our new squad and what happens? Ballmer and the Clippers are exposed for all this bullshit which puts the trade on hold and in jeopardy…
It seems to me like Ballmer and the Clippers totally fucked over the Raptors multiple times by breaking the rules, cheating, and pulling shady shit behind the scenes. They obviously deserve to be punished, but the Raptors honestly deserve some sort of compensation for being the victims of their unfair bullshit.
“breakultiple”
I like it.
What? The investigation was ongoing when Toronto was after Kawhi. They screwed themselves.
Honestly, Kawhi should be banned for life and Ballmer forced to sell the team. The league needs to make an example out of them.
How about we ban SAS for at least a year too
I think they should apply same punishment as Joe Smith. Void contract, no suspension, organization gets screwed.
Ballmer should get a lifetime ban and $50M fined and forced to sell the team. Also the Intuit Dome should be heavily sanctioned for revenue from the NBA as long as Ballmer remains the owner of the facility.
Leonard should get a 3 year suspension Whatever the max fine is allowed under the CBA he should get that too.
The GM,Coaches and anyone who touched this deal all should get 1 year bans and $1M fines. And make them apply for reinstatement.
Clippers organization should get $5M Fine.
This type of deal is just below point shaving or fixing games.
The punishment should be punatative.
This whole thing was swept under the rug until Pablo went poking his nose again.
Silver and Ballmer just want this ordeal to disappear and that’s what will happen.
Not even joking Clippers should lose all picks they currently own and they have to extend Kawhi on a 35% max for 5 years that they aren’t allowed to trade. That way Kawhi is also punished, he’s stuck on the Clippers as the guy who ruined their franchise and hated by all their fans.
And the whole contract should be a fine that gets paid out to the rest of the league. Can’t be like your punishment is receiving even more hundreds of millions haha
a YEAR? His career should be OVER.
Gonna be crazy when they barely punish anyone at all because the investigation uncovered that this kind of thing is rampant all over the league and they can’t expose that.
Clippers should be stripped of a year’s worth of draft picks. Owner should be forced to sell. And Kawhi and his agent should be banned from the league.
Everybody dumping on SAS but it is not insignificant that a talking head of his stature came out and said this on ESPN
his agent should be banned too.
Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point
A year? Life
lol ESPN setting the agenda to only ban Kawhi a year for Ballmer. You CAN buy this kind of help.
Banned. Period.
I feel like the punishment should be tilted 80⁄20 weighted towards Balmer. Kawhi is not in a position of power to make the deals and action them.
Kawhi was literally the one asking for them through his representation. Let’s all acknowledge that was a grown man. He’s not a child who doesn’t know better. The blame goes around to everyone here and they should all be punished.
I’m sure the clippers are upset, but the ring made it all worth it…oh wait
Why on earth would the clippers do this shit for a part time player?