Did Steve Balmer pay Kawhi Leonard under the table?

Yes I've said the whole time Kawhi is responsible for what his reps did regardless if he knew or not.

He should face any penalty from the NBA.

None of these violations are breaking any criminal or court law. They are only NBA rules that only have NBA actions. Its perfectly legal for Kawhi and his reps to get a no show job from any company or individual.

 

The mailing address on Kawhi KL2 Aspire LLC legal entity is 1220 Westerly Trail in Moreno Valley. House was purchased for $350k in Oct 2019. Didn't Kawhi sign with the Clippers in summer 2019? So might be someone from his group.

 

Its possible and his uncle as his financial advisor with the big bucket scenario makes since.

 

Has anyone asked the magic 8 ball yet?
https://magic-8ball.com/

 

"Outlook is not so good."

 

Kind of interesting that the Articles of Organization when creating the entity with legal zoom in 2021 never listed any member by name. So seems it was anonymous at that time who the owner was at least in publicly available filings.

Then an agent in June & August of this year, Eric Feuerstein, files those updates of mailing address & agent to his office in NY but list Kawhi as a member by his individual name.

Then a couple months later this massive bombshell story by Pablo Torre breaks. Did those filings give Pablo or others a heads up to start digging into this story?

If I was working with Kawhi on this I would've had a different anonymous LLC as an intermediary listed in those Jun+Aug filings so it couldn't have been traced back so easily to Kawhi personally just from public records.

 

Hadn't heard of the idea before that Kawhi salary stays on the clippers cap but he gets removed from the roster. That's an interesting punishment.

 

Whatever happens I don't think we see any sort of discipline for Kawhi. Players don't have to abide by the cap rules, it's up to the team to make sure that is happening. Joe Smith didn't get any kind of discipline but the league did void the remainder of his contract. I could see that happening to Kawhi before I could see them doing something like him getting out of his contract and the contract staying on the books for the Clippers.

I think Balmer will get suspended for a season or more, the other stake holder who facilitated this will get suspened for a season or more or be forced to sell his stake.

I think ultimately we already have precedence for this stuff in the Joe Smith TWolves infraction. So my prediction is that the Clippers will be fined millions of dollars and a some draft picks, Kawhi's contract will be voided and he won't be able to re-sign with the Clippers.

 

That would be smart of us and the Clippers. I would assume that since all trades have to be approved by the league that if that trade was submitted that it would be put on hold until the investigation wss complete but who knows. It would be a very shrewd move by both teams.