[Pablo Torre Finds Out] If you keep digging, Kawhi Leonard connections sprawl from the governor of Rhode Island and a Clippers “courtside cabana” to the team’s jersey patch sponsor, Visit Rwanda, and… a visit to Rwanda.
This whole time I thought the Clippers were a basketball team, it turns out they’re an organization primarily designed to find different ways to pay Kawhi Leonard
And we were bitching about them all the way back in 2019 because Lawrence Frank was tampering by constantly being at our games and trying to talk to Kawhi.
Turns out that was small potatoes.
Pablo only deals with big potatoes anyways
These potatoes sound meager.
This a Brand New Day reference lol?
Pablo just like Yelena fr
He takes all his meetings nude and in a pool?
Prove he doesn’t
I cant. His skin is so smooth.
Nude except for a Spidey mask
I think Ballmer sees Kawhi how Yelena sees Kate Bishop
Big Van Morrison fan actually
And the Lakers bitched about it too during free agency as well ss us lol.
Everyone has known FOR YEARS that Kawhi has made these requests but the Clippers still facilitated it. Absolute dumb asses you can tell him no.
They probably thought they couldnt tell him no though. Obviously, it is what the rules are made for to avoid an unfair advantage, but would he still have signed with them if all teams said “no side deals”?
This is what happens when you let tech leaders and their “move fast and break things” bullshit take over. They have zero respect for the rules or established order.
Which is funny cause I don’t quite think Balmer is in that move fast and break things generation of tech leaders.
Microsoft did have a huge impact, but I guess because windows and the office suite were a standard from the first desktop home computer I ever owned in the mid 90s it just feels like they’re the old guard. Not the “we have to change the world (to make more money)” tech heads who sniff their own farts.
And Microsoft got there because their strategy was “do a bunch of illegal shit because once you own all the market share and have all the money, no one can stop you.”
Yeah and back then we had a competent form of anti-trust that actually punished them along with Ballmer’s inability to move from hatchet man to CEO, prevented Microsoft from breaking the highs of the dotcom bubble FOR 17 YEARS.
They were the break laws and make them stop us company and so hardcore about it, they were pretty much the last time the government actually stopped monopolistic behavior
Right, Ballmer isn’t even as bad as the Zuckerberg and Altmans of the world, but what they all seemingly share is a lack of respect for rules and norms.
Its looking more and more likely that RDAambition was right and Kawhi had decided to go to the Lakers
The Clippers got desperate seeing their whale go to their crosstown rivals, and caved in to all the ridiculous and illegal requests
Kinda hilarious that the OKC championship doesn’t happen without Ballmer paying under the table. If they don’t get Kawhi, SGA is still a clipper and they probably have more success they had in the Kawhi-PG era.
iirc in 2019 there was even a story about uncle dennis or kawhi wanting (and not getting) a penthouse as part of his deal in toronto. I know were talking about billions of dollars vs 100s of millions of dollars but how much money or free stuff do you need? We need to go back to his spurs days, is that why they broke up? Has anyone dug into that
How much money was he getting from all these deals? I feel like I’ve lost track of how many shady ways Ballmer found to pay him, but surely no player is worth this amount of bullshit.
Yeah, I’m wondering why his salary, alone, wasn’t enough…? And given his generally unsuccessful tenure with the Clippers, the return on investment continues to get worse, with each new shady deal Pablo uncovers.
Because he technically took less. 5 Years for the Raptors and 4 for any other team the Aspiration money basically made the deals equal. After that he took a smaller paycut on his extension and got that difference made up as well. Allegedly.
i get why people with money want more money, what i dont get is why kawhi’s team was seemingly so insistent on obtaining this money via rulebreaking and why he was so reticent to do even 5 seconds of “work” via a tweet or selfie for millions or tens of millions of dollars?
he really comes off as such a lazy slimeball in all this as someone who never cared about the uncle dennis stuff. torre just keeps uncovering more and more ways of him being a total shitheel
Because he wanted to win too
Take pay cuts, make up the difference on the side, get better help, win a bunch of rings, and then go down in history as a top 10 all time player
As for why he didn’t do the work, nobody knows. Maybe he lost track of how many illegal deals he had going on. Maybe he didn’t know about some of them. Maybe he didn’t want to draw attention to these random ass sponsor he got to avoid scrutiny that none of them wanted. Maybe he’s just lazy
He was getting paid far above fair market value for these deals, which is against the rules. If he did any work then it would be known he was working with these companies, and open up the chance someone looks at the numbers and realized its all fucked.
It isn’t laziness, they were hoping that none of this would ever come to light.
As a Warriors fan I despise him bc of losing to him in the finals and then trading Shai & all those picks for podcast P. I couldn’t believe how he bailed on Toronto & then thought he was LeBron GM
And why exactly was he doing with all that money? Is he financing anything in particular? Any side projects?expensive habits?
You think it’s cheap being a fun guy??
If he was dumb enough to get involved with this shit in the first place, probably blowing it on stupid shit
Or what is Uncle Dennis doing with all the money?
Do you consider living an extravagant elite lifestyle an expensive habit?
Well they got to the second round that one time
Hey the made the Conference Finals!
Hang the (conference) finals banner!
This is starting to seem unironically accurate.
Shell basketball company
Here you were thinking America was a representative republic.
This is why they never won. They didn’t spend enough time on basketball operations
They spent it on “funneling money to Kawhi operations”
Balmer turned the Clippers into Amazon Prime for money laundering
Somewhere in the world, theirs a team of PR and legal ppl just weekly getting mini heart attacks, as Pablo exposes another scandal/ illegal activity.
They think themselves safe, that they have a handle on the crisis, then Pablo releases a new piece, and the teams of to scramble to build a defense.
A team full of grey hairs and premature aged suits
“Leave Kawhi Alone…” - Jeff Teague
You can build this same story out if you wanna talk about 80% of the corporations in this country. Dark money, shell companies, companies paying other companies paying themselves to give the impression of economic growth and viability. This entire system is a scam and it’s all going to collapse in our lifetime, guaranteed
This, for me is the fascinating thing. They didn’t gain any competitive advantage by paying Kawhi a max contract and then also paying him all of this under-the-table money. Why not use those connections to pay lesser players less-than-market-value connections? Maybe they also did that, or maybe the Clippers thought that there was an unwritten rule amongst teams that as long as you’re still paying players their approximate market rate on the books, paying a guy more off the books is okay.
Anyway, I hope both Pablo and the league investigators are extending their investigation beyond just Kawhi and looking at if the Clippers had any arrangements with other players. I don’t think there are any free agent signings that the Clippers made that are crazy cheap… maybe Zubac’s extension, which I think looked really good even then, but I don’t think it looks egregious.
Is it possible that the Clippers thought he is some sort of deity or something?
I genuinely think that Ballmer thinks of him as a god or something.
Remember when they put Blake Griffin next to like MLK, Mandela, and Obama on a t shirt to recruit him? Ballmer might really think of NBA players as higher order than governments.
As an American I too think of NBA players as a higher order than the government.
As an American, I think of cow dung as higher order to our current government
Blake for president! We have chosen worse in just the last two years!
It’s just too good. I can’t believe this exists
And then they traded him the moment they could lmao
Balmer didn’t recruit Blake. He bought the team after the last owner let the world know how terrible he is.
I genuinely think that he thinks that
Dude went all in thinking Kawhi was a guaranteed championship 😭
😂😂😂😂 That 3-1 choke was the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen
Then all the stories came out that they didn’t like being in the bubble, which of course is how they went up 3-1 in the first place, and blew double digit leads in the following three games
😂😂😂 That told me that the Kawhi Clippers were never going to win anything.
I think most likely Ballmer just gave Kawhi access to a few of the little schemes he and his billionaire friends use to laundry money to avoid paying taxes. There’s likely a much larger “elite” economy we are getting a little glimpse of from Pablo’s investigation.
Absolutely
when you’re a poverty franchise like the Clippers, it makes sense
He thinks of Kawhi as a developer
To be fair this was after 2019 where he had a ridiculous run
Have a feeling a lot of the players have shady deals but, they actually do some things so nobody ever finds out
The fact that the raptors and lakers both reported Kawhi to the NBA for trying to circumvent the cap tells me it’s not common, at least not to this extent.
Yeah, the whole give me this and I do nothing is the issue. Ballmer made it happen and funded it because there is no benefit to the endorsor. It’s a lot different than hooking someone up with an endorsement where there is mutual benefit
Edit: and my previous comment was re the Clippers not in general
Yes, and my point is that it’s not common to circumvent the cap this way. Sure someone might get a luxury car for doing some promotions for a local dealer who’s friends with the owner, or someone might be looped into doing things for a local clothing chain for a couple hundred thousand, but they’ll be paid market rate. So they’re offered opportunities, but still need to do work that’s mutual beneficial. Legal, not shady, not cap circumvention. It’s one of the main draws of big markets.
Paying someone considerably more than their work brings in for you is not astute business, and is still cap circumvention (because the assumption is the business gets the money back somehow). That shit is not common. And is illegal.
What’s the difference between an organization overpaying because they’re wildly incompetent, and an organization that is overpaying for nefarious reasons though?
This situation looks like both
Not saying you’re wrong, but it’s possible other athletes are at least willing to do a minimal amount of work. Like a few million to show up to something for a few hours one or two times. Kawhi might’ve been demanding all this and saying no, I won’t show up once.
It’s also investigated and tracked and they have to be paid market value. You’re not giving Kawhi 10x what you’d give Taylor swift
It doesn’t work because as soon as it is public, there is a papertrail, it needs to be (more or less) market rate.
It is obviously not that common. We would’ve heard about it and this wouldn’t be as huge of a story.
The very idea that “everyone does it” is almost 100% an idea that was planted by the Clippers in order to sway public opinion.
That idiot really tried to strongarm the fucking Lakers of all teams lmao
Have a feeling a lot of the players have shady deals
This is the kind of rationalizing that is harmful to any discussion about this topic. It’s like when you talk about some voter fraud shit and someone says “Oh, well both sides probably do it” and it’s like “Ok, but where’s the fucking proof?” This is the most proof of shady deals we’ve seen for an individual player in probably any major US sport ever. What does “I have a feeling that a lot of the players have shady deals” actually add to this discussion?
I wish this could be top of the thread when it comes to the ‘whataboutism’ that I hear from a million people about a million topics. The fallacy of ‘everyone does it’ is a poison that makes every conversation bitter.
Having some nasty flashbacks to the first Trump administration, when I heard a half dozen “everybody does it” responses to the utterly unprecedented disclosure that Trump had tried to extort the Ukrainian government to the tune of 400m congressionally-earmarked dollars in order to persecute his domestic political opponent.
People will use this bullshit to excuse pretty much anything so long as it makes them feel better.
For real, like was he elite? Obviously, but damn what would they have offered LeBron lmao
Probably a yellow hummer.
Maybe some throwback jerseys
At first I thought this was a weird comment, but upon reflection, goddaaam they treated him absurdly well.
He is their Allah
All they did was to respect Zeus’s law, for he (or his unc) could be a god walking among us mortals.
Show a bit of hospitality and y’all immediately jump to conclusions, and bring out the pitchforks as if Balmer had sacked an ancient city or something, smh…
this guy was not fucking joking when he said he finds out
I mean lets be honest we know how much loopholes bilionairs go through to not pay taxes. None of this is surprising its just at this point funny how blatant it is no one can really do anything about, its not like people are gonna stop watchin nba games because of this.
Imagine trying to untangle the private equity buying the Lakers. I think we know how widespread this is about to get.
There’s a Kushner involved, so you know the corruption will be blatant.
Can’t wait till he does that
It’s just piling up. The players have gotten more talented but the play on the court is getting worse to due bad rules changes and terrible refs. Add in the blatantly corrupts owners and players making generational money that undoubtedly changes a person, the fact that watching a game you need 3 different subscriptions of apps. All this piling up makes what used to be a fun product, a product to enjoy in your spare time and help you forget about your shit life, is now starting to be a not so fun product anymore.
I hear you about the issues but the league is still super fun to watch imo
yes but the quality has dropped over the course of the last decade imho. especially the regular season
playoffs always been fire but the sports betting shit annoying af
Its gotten worse for sure for some people but we are far from the point where regular watchers would actually consider boycotting games over something like this. If anything fans will now be mad at their owners for not bending the rules and getting better players.
It’s not so much a boycott as an alienation. The feeling that this league isn’t for me anymore. It’s happened to me. I used to be a “league pass, listening to non-stop nba podcasts” kind of person and now I’m a “I’ll keep up through no dunks but I barely watch anymore” type person.
Don’t forget the legalized gambling that the league gets a cut of!
Agreed.
You’ve cited several reasons why I haven’t paid for TV in four years (🏴☠️) and the only pro sporting events I’ve gone to live in the last several years, are ones where I’ve been lucky enough to be in a suite where the tickets/food/booze are covered (due to a well connected buddy).
Not gonna pay to watch 8 to 9-figure employees, working in a 10-figure palace, owned by 10 to 11-figure dudes. This stuff isn’t for us plebs anymore.
Hard to believe that in the late 70s, I had to stay up late just to watch a highlight show of NBA playoff games lol. Playoff games weren’t even on in real-time
Tax loopholes are not remotely as wacky as this. They’re pretty straightforward and just require domiciling an entity in a handful of nations
This is a who’s who of money funneling options with loose to no connections to each other
This is much more akin to financial fraud than tax loopholes.
Daktronics could find themselves in some hot water with the SEC over revenue reporting. Pablo gave a subtle call out to it. But this is the US, our regulatory agencies are gutted, and Ballmer is one of the richest men in the world, so it won’t even get investigated.
Time to change FAFO from “Fuck around, Found out” to “Fuck Around, Fuckin Pablo found out”
He wants that second Peabody award.
At this point I think people just come and tell him shit. Pablo Takes Calls
Looks like NBA and Silver are just waiting for Pablo to complete the investigation! Lol.
supposedly the investigators already knew about all this stuff.
People keep saying this but it’s not definitively known, all we know is that Wacthell had some conversation with Daktronics, but we don’t know how deep they went. They may have just called every Clippers sponsor and not pressed much more.
There’s probably some truth to this - how much do we reveal?
Pablo should keep some stuff in reserves. They probably don’t want to release the results of their investigation only for Pablo to reveal more stuff. They need to cover for Ballmer properly.
I’m gonna need Kawhi to drop a remake of “It Wasn’t Me.” Before the season starts, thanks.
They said you weren’t a tree planter
Wasn’t me
Never got you on camera
Pablo came in and he caught me red-handed Circumventing with the owner!
Picture this, we were both risk taking, But they said I was a loner…
How could I forget that he was just A tattletaling pip-squeak!
All this time he was studying and Never took her eyes off me!
Kawhi just announced his new book “if I did it”
(What if, and how) I Did(‘nt do) it.
Published by Steve Ballmer
“If the wallet doesn’t fit, you must acquit”
What the fuck is happening with this conspiracy? It’s gonna end up linking to Rasputin’s death eventually.
Kawhi actually overthrew the government and put the Shah in power in Iran in 1953.
Kawhi also shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and kicked off WW1.
I heard after that, he killed Jimmy Hoffa and disappeared the body.
A date which will live in infamy. Pearl Arbor.
destoyed rwanda and now helping to rebuild
The sacking of Constantinople? Believe it or not, Kawhi Leonard.
It’s a big club, and you aint in it!
Apparently nobody is in it, except Kawhi Leonard.
I don’t know. I feel like this thing isn’t common per se, but there are definitely other players and maybe even other teams sweating about Pablo moving on from Kawhi+Clippers and zoning in on them. Not sure how big it is but at the very least I think James Harden should be getting that microscope given his claims the 76ers lied about the money they’d give him before he took basically the same contract with the Clippers. Screams of getting money through the backdoor. Not to mention, when he’s traded, where does he go? From the team owned by the wealthiest owner to the one owned by the second wealthiest owner. Wouldn’t be surprised at all to find he was getting something from the Cavs as well, though likely not as much or as sloppily concealed as the Clippers.
Nah, the fact that the Raptors are Lakers both reported it tells you that this was very much not normal. Introducing players to sponsors is normal, but the deals are market rate like $250k for a commercial, actually require work, and aren’t being paid by the team as a pass through because they’re legit sponsorships.
That’s literally why the investigation is taking so long lol. Mutually assured destruction
This shit goes all the way to the top doesn’t it
Kawhi got Josh Kushner to gift him the Lakers
You think Pablo’s gonna find Uncle Dennis in the Epstein files?
All the way to the almost top.
the Governor…of Rhode Island?
We Rhodies are just as surprised as you are
my understanding is that the Rhode Island governor is a venally corrupt fuck so it wasn’t that surprising at all
It’s more about how out of left field this particular story is, and that he, of all people, is involved.
Ah yeah, totally fair. Honestly at this point if you told me that Ballmer engineered the Walters-to-Kushner sale of us to distract from the Kawhi boondoggle, I’d be likely to believe that.
All three of you?
Two, now. Steve died. Or moved out; not sure which.
My condolences about Steve
Just like we all expected…..
Wouldn’t be the first time RI has had a political man in power be involved in scandals. Look up Buddy Cianci’s story. Fucking crazy
For its size RI is incredibly corrupt
Yeah I was gonna say the Rhode Island politics part is somehow the least surprising part
Kawhi lore getting so dense we’re two episodes away from Adam Silver cameoing in a Pablo Torre cinematic universe.
Stan Lee is gonna come back for this shit.
David Stern would’ve magically appeared in Pablo’s house at like 3am with a deal to silence all of this.
*a smothering pillow
Is “deal” a euphemism for sawed-off 12 gauge?
Bullshit, Stern would have loved the chance to show that he had bigger balls than Ballz.
Rhode Island’s primary election is in a few weeks, curious to see if this has any effect on Dan McKee
Bro is dead man walking in RI already
Honestly, I keep coming back to the same question: why risk all this for Kawhi?
The bigger this thing gets, the funnier it is that the Clippers season ended up the way that it did lmao.
He is an NBA Champion, Finals MVP and easily top 5 player in the league in 2019.
Ballmer, the richest man in the NBA, just bought a team, scammed his way to a new arena and wanted a star to market it with.
Ballmer convinced himself that Kawhi, when healthy, was the best player in the league. And that he wanted to be a clipper. Kawhi was the team’s key to legitimacy (oh the irony) and so they were going to give him what he wanted by any means necessary.
Someone assign Pablo to the Epstein files. He could give new information every week for a few years
He’s been doing a few Epstein episodes, mostly investigating links to sports in some way or another, with Epstein’s donations to Harvard (and their women’s rugby team, bizarrely) or former NBA player and former Congressman Tom McMillen why he was on Epstein flight logs in the 90’s.
It’s harder to carve out a unique take when others are looking at the same data, though, so the juiciest stuff has come from the Kawhi story.
How many con men have conned Ballmer? Really we need Mark Cuban on the case here to explain to us how Ballmer is both a super genius having made inhuman amounts of money, yet a total fool being conned left and right by everyone he’s done business with apparently.
Totally agree. My non-billionaire brain can’t comprehend how Ballmer is the victim in all this. We desperately need Mark Cuban to make sense of it for us!
The whole narrative that Ballmer is a supergenius has always been PR bullshit. The man was a poor CEO, laughing stock as he left, and then people lionized him as “the greatest investor of the era” for doing nothing more than diamond handing his MSFT shares for 30 years while Bill diversified.
What’s funny is he did get scammed multiple times and it was obvious. Aspiration convinced him to give them 28M in exchange for stock, for them to also outlay 48M (in cash + stock) to Kawhi. Anyone with a brain would have immediately smelled how fishy it was, why would a company promise to pay more to Kawhi than Ballmer is putting in? And Ballmer still gets stock out of the deal. The only explanation for behavior like that is that Aspiration was a crumbling fraud who needed short term cash. A company that is even in moderate standing would never agree to it.
The man is just so unimaginably greedy and surrounded by yes men that he didn’t think for a second how bad of an idea it was.
Damn Mark Cuban really did take a step back in all this after more evidence started to come about.
It was just funny when Mark kept saying he didn’t have time to listen to his pod cast but knew every detail to discuss in his arguments and kept coming back at him weekly.
Now he’s quiet. 🤐
Apparently in the Daktronics kickback case, Ballmer has decided that the “I got conned” thing won’t work.
I love good investigative journalism.
Pablo is crushing.
If he actually visited Rwanda then he likely fulfilled the sponsorship duties though. The only issue with the aspiration sponsorship was that he never did anything
It’s not really the only issue tho.. It’s what makes it indefensible by the rules, but obviously there’s also a problem with a player getting an extra paycheck from his team’s owner even if there was someone in the middle.
Based on what’s been reported it’s not uncommon for sponsors to want to sponsor the team and also players on the team. Going back to the original Kawhi reporting they had made a point about how the Aspiration contract was only valid as long as he was on the Clippers and it turned out that was also pretty normal language.
For example Rakuten was the jersey sponsor for the Warriors and have a deal with Steph
Which the whole cans of worms the NBA is terrified of. Kawhi is not the only one. He just took it to another level but those kind of deals are so common.
Yeah but does Lacob sponsor Rakuten by the same amount they sponsor Steph?
While I agree, I strongly suspect that there are other people who have just that arrangement, the difference here of course being the no-show portion
And the owner is investing the exact amount the sponsoring company is paying the same player. For what we know, Lacob isn’t paying Rakuten back the cost of the curry sponsorship
how does this have upvotes? the issue with the aspiration sponsorship is that it was completely funded by the clippers, the company at large didn’t want to do it, and they never even announced it. all 3 of those reasons are much more important than whether or not he did anything.
The irony is that he was supposed to plant trees for aspiration
Brother the only issue with the Aspiration sponsorship is that it was salary cap circumvention
Not doing any of the duties is why people started digging into it, it doesn’t magically make it legal with regards to the salary cap rules
Also the amount.
That is not the only issue. The real issue is he got paid 50 times what Hollywood A actors did. That is clearly a kickback.
Had it been public, league would have 100% voided both deals because they make no economic sense.
It always comes back to fucking Rhode Island, doesn’t it.
Wait until you see what their Governor wore to the game…
At this point, Pablo is doing us a disservice by doing sports journalism.
The problem is that if he did political journalism he’d be in Guantanamo prison or in Russia hanging out with Edward Snowden.
Ballmer and Kawhi’s team: “this fucking Pablo guy really be finding out shit”
Kawhi is the inverse Willie Cauley-Stein
What the fk is Adam Silver doing? He got some under the table money too tf?
Feels like Adam Silver has an under the table Kawhi deal with Ballmer now too
He’s already unpopular here. I’ll be surprised if he gets reelected
Next, we gonna find out that kawhi owns the clippers and ballmer got traded to the raptors
Lmfao, damn. Pablo coming like Michael Myers, the man don’t quit! Go Pablo Go!
I wonder who is doing better at getting info on this, Pable Torre or Wachtell Lipton. He’s getting awards and advertising revenue for more results, while they get to keep billing the longer this drags out. Ironically PT might be costing the league more because the legitimacy of the organization is at stake here, and its richest, maybe most respected owner is the one who shat on the league’s rules. So Silver has to show some spine or clearly it is really all just a joke.
Hasn’t Kawhi suffered enough? He had to play for the Clippers for years. Should just get off for time served.
Why the NBA spending all this money on this law firm when Pablo giving them everything for free?
How greedy is this Kawhi pos? kick him and Ballmer out of the league. Cheaters
Is there actual new info on the Rhode Island thing? Last time Pablo reported on it it was thin at best, at least compared to the Daktronics/Aspiration stuff.
it was very public when Kawhi went to Rwanda. There’s a massive court there with his face on it that was a big public event. There’s not some big thing there no matter how fun it is for Torre to link it to everything else.
Ban them from the league
Kawhi might be the highest paid athlete in the world at this rate.
Next we find out he owns the Intuit centre
Imagine if the Clippers spent half as much time trying to win basketball games as they did finding no show deals for Kawhi. They might have actually won something!
Pablo’s putting more work into this story (that most people think is true but don’t really care about other than making jokes online) than federal investigators have put into the Epstein files.
Too bad they couldn’t set up a partnership with a quality athletic trainer to keep his ass off the injury report
What does Pablo have against Kawhi? Like why does he hate this man so much
They’re going to murder Pablo
That Ballmer is willingly lending support to a nation that’s using tourism to cover a genocide that they are facilitating in the DRC is something the league shouldn’t have let happened. It’s like Ballmer can’t help but to make deals with criminals.