BallmerGate: How To Eat The Wrong Billionaire

I will start with the bullet points of my positions regarding the Kawhi Leonard + Uncle Dennis/Aspiration/Ballmer fiasco.

1. Pablo Torre is an incredible reporter, and all the reporting done on this has been thorough, exhaustive, and balanced enough to take the claims as legitimate and worthy of the acclaim it has garnered. It is the best example of modern investigative sports journalism in an era where that is largely dead because it doesn’t increase shareholder value.

2. The NBA has enough evidence based on Torre’s reporting to issue punishment. The CBA does not require the smoking gun for Silver to issue such a ruling. It requires more to hold up in arbitration, reportedly via ESPN, but for Silver to issue punishment, there’s enough “there” there, just based on the Torre reporting.

3. Compensating a player beyond the scope of the CBA, through whatever mechanisms and circuits, is a violation, and we have rules for a reason, blah, blah, blah. There’s just no argument that if the Clippers violated the CBA, then they shouldn’t face penalties.

I just don’t really care about any of it. Despite that, I find the way that people have attached themselves to this story to be… fraught with problems.

Part of Torre’s case for why the Ballmer case matters is that it’s about a billionaire simply not caring about the rules.

He talked about it with Henry Abbot on this episode:

“Right. And so, again, it’s not even like rules for rules’ sake. It’s the notion of are we, as you put it earlier, telling people the truth? Do you want to know what’s actually happening? That’s the question I have as a journalist for the audience. And then the question for the league is: do you even need to pretend that there is anything resembling integrity to the things you say are cardinally important?”

“Yeah. And I hate when I feel like a Reagan conservative about the rule book or anything resembling the respectability of sports, but if sports doesn’t care about the rules, then what are we even doing anymore? The whole reason I fell in love with basketball, the whole reason that I care about the NBA, came from this fundamental belief that I was watching something that I could believe.”

“If you’re not going to punish this stuff—I’m thinking about this as a fan—I wonder if the NBA knows that part of the reason why this story has taken off is not because people really want to see the salary cap enforced. It’s because fans are thinking to themselves: ‘Are we even watching something that I can believe in anymore?’”

"Just to summarize it as briefly as I can: does cheating matter? Right. Does cheating matter? I gave the whole prelude as to how you came up through this business and how my perspective was formed in this business, because being anti-authority does not necessarily historically align with people who wonder aloud, worried, 'does cheating matter,' right?"

He’s not wrong, here.

Sports should be a place governed by fairness (“fair play”) and it should be a place where everyone puts aside their personal ambitions to pursue a cultural good.

It just isn’t.

It hasn’t been for some time.

It makes too much money, and now it’s just another avenue for the mega-wealth to increase their wealth.

Asking for rules and guidelines to be upheld to keep it as a sacred place of competition for the fans is a noble pursuit.

What bothers me is that this is the case we’ve chosen as the avatar for billionaire malfeasance.

Here’s what the evidence suggests that Ballmer did, from my viewpoint.1

Ballmer used a shady company—which defrauded its investors (including Ballmer)—to pay his best superstar more money under the table.

In doing so, he paid Leonard money that otherwise would have required luxury tax costs on it, which in turn would have gone to poor, less fortunate franchises under the tax as part of the revenue-sharing agreement.

In turn, in 2024, Leonard signed a deal for less than the max. It can be easily intuited that by Leonard agreeing to less than a max, it allowed the Clippers to afford other players on higher deals and pay less in luxury taxes during the length of Leonard’s contract.

Except the 2024 amount of his contract was the absolute max.

However, in 2025-26, he was off the max by $3.1 million. That differential wound up saving the Clippers about $10 million in repeater luxury tax payments, which, again would have gone to those poor, misbegotten franchises below the tax line, like the Denver Nuggets and Boston Celtics. 23

So Ballmer saved $10 million last season. That, of course, is offset by the $28 million that Leonard was allegedly paid in cap circumvention, the money just didn’t go into revenue sharing.

It’s important to note here that none of the luxury tax payments go to the players. It does not go into BRI. You can argue that the teams that receive revenue sharing then divert those funds back into player salaries and other benefits for the players and if you do, I have some ocean-front property in Arizona for you, along with some magical beans.

But still, in doing so, the Clippers violated the CBA. If that’s your interpretation, based on the fact there is no “reasonable justification” for the way this unfolded, then they should be punished.

We just shouldn’t care about this.

Yes, a billionaire broke the rules.

He did so to pay a player more.

The fact that he did so for a player who has never been worth the investment teams have made in him, in a player who was pretty clearly going to screw this up given his absolute disrespect for everyone and everything that he and his uncle have historically shown, makes it a dumb decision, but not a morally odious one. The fact that he used a fraudulent company to do so makes it, again, a dumb decision but not a morally odious one.

The other suggestion of harm is that the under-the-table deals are why he signed with the Clippers. There are well-sourced reports of Robertson asking both the Raptors and Lakers to provide equity shares of other franchises or no-show employment deals (or both) in free agency conversations in 2019.

It follows, then, that they would have asked the same of the Clippers. Why would Leonard and Robertson ask those things of the other two franchises and not the Clippers? And if they did, what did the Clippers say?

This is a bit of a trap because even admitting those things were asked for admits the existence of those no-show jobs and illicit benefits as an option. Denying they were asked for only makes them look guiltier, because how could the pair not ask the Clippers for it?

But we also had seen so much Clippers smoke leading up to his free agency. Maybe that’s because they had already agreed to such deals. But every indication that spring was that Leonard was leaving the Raptors — who wound up winning the title and still that story did not change — in part so he could live closer to San Diego.

LeBron was with the Lakers, Leonard had never made any suggestion of wanting to play with him.

I think it’s hard to argue that the only thing that stopped the Lakers from getting Kawhi Leonard was fake tree planting and fake sponsorships with a scoreboard company four years later.

If the Clippers were willing to give Leonard these deals when others did not4, then it obviously gave them an advantage, and that’s certainly worth nullifying all his contracts and punishing the Clippers, as I’ve said I’m fine with. But is that the harm I’m supposed to be up in arms about?

(The best argument that you can make in trying to argue for harm caused by this was that Ballmer held up a company that defrauded its investors. If they were just using Aspiration (and Daktronics) for laundering purposes, then their laundering efforts furthered harm. If they honestly believed in the company, which the $60 million investment from Ballmer and $300 million investment from the Clippers surely seems to indicate, and they were also using this company to circumvent the cap5, then they were victims of fraud who also used the company defrauding them for fraudulent purposes. Fraudy fraud fraud fraud. )

If Ballmer had used these means to avoid paying a player, that would be odious.

If the Clippers had used these means to save money and the hurt the fans, that would be odious.

If this scheme were built on something that impacted anyone other than the other billionaire owners and our sense of “fair play,” then it would be odious.

But none of that is true.

My bias here is that I’ve covered the league for 20 years and been in locker rooms and in the buildings for 14 years. The league’s seedy underbelly is hidden, but just barely. If you look just slightly off the court after the lights go off with any real inspection, you’ll see the rot.

Agent deals, billionaire connections, one thing connecting to another which connects to another. You start to look at almost anything that gets spit into the public consciousness, or start inspecting who’s talking to who on the sideline before games and you get to feel a certain way about it.

I’m unable to believe that this is the first time this kind of thing has happened. It’s just the second time (shout out Joe Smith) that a team/player combo has been dumb and lazy enough to get caught. And if we’re judging people on getting caught, we don’t actually care about the act itself, do we?

We probably should open up all the NBA’s books and look into every deal and every mechanism and every shady corner. These teams are cultural assets that belong to their cities and fans more than they should belong to billionaire owners and quarter-billionaire players.

But they don’t.

The owners aren’t after Ballmer because he violated the spirt of competition. They’re mad he fucked with the money. Specifically, their money by taking luxury taxes off the table and using resources outside of what they were allowed to use — even if none of them were willing to use it which is what caused the 2023 CBA in the first place6 — to gain an advantage.

And Rule No.1 in the NBA is: You don’t fuck with the money.

Not the game. Not the spirit of competition. Not the rules. The money.

So when people side with the owners in being outraged — outraged I say! — about this corruption, they’re actually siding with billionaires being mad about not being more rich.

Whatboutism is a fallacy and deeply unproductive. But in this case I’m struggling with calibrating offenses.

Tom Dundon is slowly murdering the Portland Trail Blazers from the inside while bleeding taxpayers and may be trying to move the team.

The Lakers’ ownership situation is…. /gestures broadly.

The Orlando Magic. The Dallas Mavericks. The NBA Champion New York Knicks, for crying out loud. We looked up and down the roster and came away with Ballmer — again, not a hero — as our best example of billionaire corruption?

I’m supposed to look around the NBA and think that the paragon of malfeasance, that the best example of corruption is the guy who got a superstar — in the player empowerment era where everyone wants superstars treated like gods — more money?

Owners have built a CBA to artificially suppress spending using the apron system as a hard cap and while the players still, collectively, received 51% percent of BRI, it impossible not to see the impacts this system is having on roster building and how it impacts the fans.

There are signs and signals of rot in the name of greed all over the NBA and the fans have continuously and consistently paid for it.

But I’m supposed to want Ballmer hanged as a token billionaire for spending more money to make the team better?

I don’t mind the sentiment. I mind the target.

And again, that doesn’t mean I don’t think he or the Clippers should be punished, or that the punishment should be light. I just think that trying to rebalance our societal and NBA ills and then going “the law’s the law!” is a little ridiculous here.

Ballmer’s not a hero. From ProPublica:

Ballmer pays such a low rate, in part, because of a provision of the U.S. tax code. When someone buys a business, they’re often able to deduct almost the entire sale price against their income during the ensuing years. That allows them to pay less in taxes. The underlying logic is that the purchase price was composed of assets — buildings, equipment, patents and more — that degrade over time and should be counted as expenses.

But in few industries is that tax treatment more detached from economic reality than in professional sports. Teams’ most valuable assets, such as TV deals and player contracts, are virtually guaranteed to regenerate because sports franchises are essentially monopolies. There’s little risk that players will stop playing for Ballmer’s Clippers or that TV stations will stop airing their games. But Ballmer still gets to deduct the value of those assets over time, almost $2 billion in all, from his taxable income.

This allows Ballmer to perform a kind of financial magic trick. If he profits from the Clippers, he can — legally — inform the IRS that he is losing money, thus saving vast sums on his taxes. If the Clippers are unprofitable in a given year, he can tell the IRS he’s losing vastly more.

But at least Ballmer behaves the way we should want owners to behave. He flies the Wall to road playoff games. He privately funded, with no public money, Intuit Dome. I want to stress this because it’s something I’ve been looking into: all these other owners are working over their communities for either new arenas or development deals that rely on public money or tax breaks. Ballmer paid a $100 million community fee to the city that went into, along with other things, affordable housing. He paid for broadcasting the team’s games. Everything he does in regards to the team is to make the team better and improve life for the fans.

This is the guy I’m supposed to line up to eat the Rich, with Robert Pera, Tillman Fertitta and Tom Dundon next to me with a fork and knife?

“It’s not about that, it’s about right and wrong.”

Which is where we return to “I’m fine with them being punished. But the bloodlust is produced by either misguided concepts of who the real problem is or by being a Lakers fan. 7

If you lump in Ballmer with all billionaires as inherently immoral on account of their wealth8, then that’s fine. But there’s nothing about these circumstances — so far9— that reveal anything beyond our normal accepted odiousness.

Now, it doesn’t have to be a binary. We don’t have to care about the gross amount of owner unethical conduct or Ballmer breaking the CBA. But it should probably influence how much emotional investment we pour into one vs. another.