To what extent does the Clippers scandal affect the NBA? It’s “the defining scandal of Adam Silver’s tenure as commissioner,” according to Pablo Torre, who first revealed the details of Kawhi Leonard’s $28 million “no-show” endorsement deal with green-banking business Aspiration on his podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out almost a month ago.
Torre has certainly uncovered compelling evidence that raises many questions. Why did Clippers owner Steve Ballmer continue putting money in Aspiration and also in the personal charity of cofounder Joe Sanberg even after news broke that Aspiration was under investigation by the feds? Why did his Clippers co-owner Dennis Wong invest in it, too? In what world is a $28 million player endorsement deal involving no ads or appearances normal? The NBA has initiated an investigation to attempt to answer these questions. Such investigations take months, not weeks, and the league knows the public’s attention span is short. Here’s an easy prediction: This one won’t end with the NBA making Ballmer sell the team like the Donald Sterling investigation did.
Depending on what the league finds, it could yield anything from a major to a minor punishment to nothing at all.
The NBA could conclude it buys Ballmer’s thin explanation that Aspiration “conned me.” I’m more interested in how a little-known carbon-credits fintech company secured a $300 million deal as an official “founding sponsor” of an NBA team a price and designation that required NBA approval. The situation reminds me very much of FTX, the fraudulent crypto exchange that launched in 2019, surged to a $32 billion valuation by early 2022, and collapsed by the end of that same year.
Along the way, FTX cozied up to Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen, plus a slew of athlete endorsers. (Aspiration had Drake and Leo DiCaprio.) In March 2021, FTX entered a 19-year, $135 million stadium naming rights deal with the Miami Heat. Why did the Heat, NBA, and city of Miami trust that a company that had existed for less than two years would be around for 19 years? In an interview with FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried now serving a 25-year sentence in a California prison in May 2021, I asked him that. He smiled and said, “It’s been a pretty good year for us.
To the point where, frankly, we don’t need to rely on the other 18 years to have the funds for this.” By January 2023, the company was dead and its logo stripped from the Heat arena.