The Pulitzer Prize board said Pablo Torre, a podcaster, “seemingly” broke a story about the Los Angeles Clippers. Esteemed editors, authors, professors and fellows declared Torre had earned an audio reporting award, based on how the franchise “seemingly evaded the NBA’s salary cap rules by funneling money to a star player through an environmental startup.”
That is not true, reports ESPN, where Torre once hosted a daily TV show before he and his partner were dumped. Which means the Pulitzer board should reconsider whether Torre deserves a $15,000 cash prize and a certificate. All we’ve heard on his program since last September is how owner Steve Ballmer circumvented the cap and why the Clippers were crooks who used a green banking company, Aspiration, where the co-founder surrendered Monday for 14 years in federal prison.
He was wrong. Unless you believe the NBA isn’t playing silly games when it says, “ESPN’s article regarding the LA Clippers investigation — for which the NBA declined to cooperate — contains numerous and significant inaccuracies. The results in this matter will be made clear once the investigation is concluded.” Look, Torre is wrong about Ballmer. Just as he was wrong that North Carolina removed Bill Belichick’s girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, from the football program. Just as he was incorrect that Antonio Gates, an NFL Hall of Famer, organized a rigged poker game in Miami. Torre shouldn’t have suggested Ballmer rigged the cap to pay star Kawhi Leonard, which means The Athletic — which signed him to a multi-year licensing contract — should ponder its future in a crippling year when it also employed Dianna Russini.
“When the time is right,” Torre wrote Monday on X, “I am extremely, extremely excited for our episode about this.”
How about quitting? Until he decides if he ever can validate a story. Haven’t we had enough?
The media world will get by without Torre, who will pounce on the NBA’s take — which wasn’t written by commissioner Adam Silver. Sports journalism viewed The Athletic as a final chance of survival, until a podcaster botched the NBA story and Russini’s insider information involved Mike Vrabel’s lips. The New York Times cannot handle the frail results of a side site while running a prominent newspaper of record.
Turns out the ESPN report — authored by Don Van Natta Jr., Baxter Holmes and Ramona Shelburne — revealed the Clippers did not advance money through team sponsors to pay Leonard. Critics will say the NBA cut a sly deal with the network, given their long-time arrangement, and refused to find anything wrong with an owner worth $173 billion. I watch for such conflicts, in all sports. Torre appears to be a victim of fraudulent sources, including Joseph Sanberg, who will be enjoying his first night on a federally funded mattress.
If anything, the law firm determined after 11 months that the Clippers should be checked out if they failed “to supervise” an employee when introducing Leonard to sponsors. That means nothing. Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz fully understand the league won’t be punishing Ballmer or Leonard. His trade to the Toronto Raptors should happen, weeks after it was announced.
In a statement given to ESPN, the Clippers say they “introduced players, including Kawhi Leonard, to companies with which we had business relationships. Making introductions between players and team partners is both an ordinary practice by NBA teams and a common request of players and representatives.”
Did Leonard and his uncle/advisor, Dennis Robertson, cut deals with sponsors? Such as Daktronics, which manufactured the “Halo” video board at Intuit Dome? None of it was true, said the law firm, which has its own future at stake. “The fact that a player has an endorsement relationship with a company that also does business with his team is not evidence of salary-cap circumvention,” said the statement, which said the Clippers didn’t “negotiate or dictate” Leonard’s endorsement contracts.
You might ask why it took almost a year for Silver and the law firm to figure this out. As I wrote recently, it took 11 months and 12 days to investigate Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Silver needed more time than Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. The NBA is a mess, between Mark Walter’s sale of the Lakers and a slew of tank jobs. In 2025, Ballmer told ESPN: “The introduction got made and then they were off to the races on, on their own. We weren’t involved,” he said of Aspiration. “I eventually learned that they had reached a deal. I have no idea what the deal was.”
For now, I want a reaction from the New York Times.
And the Pulitzer Prize board.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host.
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