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It’s true. I am the one person in the world who was once an Aspiration user. I tried to find my old debit card and sadly failed. I remember it had a pleasant silhouette of trees. It looked like this! How very noble.
Why would I do this? You know, that’s a fair question. I guess I was in an ESG phase. (Don’t tell Harper from Industry.) I think they had some kind of sign-up bonus in the early goings. That, and I seem to recall they were early on the “get your direct deposit a few days early!!!” train, upon which I hopped. For all that, I think I ended up using them for a few months, and then — with apologies to the LA Clippers organization — churned my way to another online bank. No hard feelings though.
Until recently, when I discovered that Aspiration — which I had not checked in on in the last ~4 years or so — was at the heart of the biggest NBA scandal since, I don’t know, Tim Donaghy?
What may be the funniest aspect of all this is the fact that I’m not the only one who seems to have forgotten they existed. So did Kawhi Leonard. Only difference is, he got paid $28M for his amnesia. Would that we were all so fortunate.
From what I can glean at this point — which, to be clear, is less than definitive — it sure looks like the narrative Pablo Torre laid out when breaking this story still holds. The Clippers appear to have gone around the league’s salary cap, paying Kawhi some ~$28 million more than they were allowed to by way of investments in Aspiration from Clippers owner Steve Ballmer.
Essentially, the claim is that Ballmer laundered money that was destined for Kawhi through this bank. There’s now another name involved here too, Ballmer’s old college roommate, a guy named Dennis Wong.
Which is confusing, because he’s not even the only Dennis involved here. We’ve been double-Dennised! The other one colloquially goes by “Uncle Dennis,” because he’s A.) Kawhi Leonard’s uncle and B.) Kawhi Leonard’s de facto manager, and C.) a known nuisance.
He’s pretty well-established in NBA circles as a guy who has zero shame about holding his hand out to teams and asking what’s in it for him. Which, for the record, is fine! That’s his job. So I don’t think anyone should be coming for him over that.
It’s more that what he’s asked for — and, apparently, gotten — has not been above board. Allow me to direct you to 2019, the year that Kawhi signed with the Clippers. You may recall he was leaving the Toronto Raptors after leading them to a title. As Kawhi was courting teams in free agency, Uncle Dennis reportedly requested the following benefits:
“The [Toronto] Star reported that Robertson demanded $10 million a year in sponsorship income but that Leonard didn't want to do anything for the money.”
Huh. That sound familiar?
Sidenote, while we’re on this. I’ve always been of the opinion that Kawhi gets away with being a total diva on the basis that he is also remarkably quiet as star athletes go. His acrimonious exit from San Antonio of all places looks more and more red-flaggy as time goes on. All this stuff with the Clippers now supports that notion. Just saying.
The NBA does not appear like it’s in any rush to come down on Kawhi, Ballmer, the Clippers, or any combination. It’s as good a reminder as any that we’re no longer living in David Stern’s NBA. You gotta figure he’d have dropped the hammer. Adam Silver hasn’t shown as much appetite for that more combative style during his tenure, and I’m not sure he’s about to find that muscle now.
Roughly six years ago — which, funny enough, is exactly when this whole alleged quid pro quo took place — Silver referred to circumventing the cap as a “cardinal sin.” Responding to this situation this week, he’s been more circumspect. I’d say this does take a bit of a lenient angle, if you’re reading between the lines.
“I would be reluctant to act if there was a mere appearance of impropriety. I think the goal of a full investigation is to find if there really was impropriety. Because also, in a public-facing sport, the public at times reaches conclusions that later turn out to be completely false. I would want anybody else who is in the situation Mr. Ballmer is in right now, or Kawhi Leonard, to be treated the same way I would want to be treated if people are making allegations against me.”
That was before the latest from Pablo Torre and co., who released another episode Thursday detailing a few more revelations that look a little worse.
In 2022, Aspiration was in rough shape financially. According to documents uncovered by Torre, they were overdue on a $1.75M payment they owed to Kawhi Leonard under the terms of his endorsement deal.
Which, just to remind everyone, was pretty clearly a sham. That part, we can say with certainty. Kawhi has never done a damn thing to promote or endorse Aspiration, and I doubt he’s about to start now in light of all this smoke. I’m sure it seemed like a pretty tidy way to make $28M at the time. And let’s be real, I don’t know that he’s going to have to give any of it back. It’s far more likely that the Clippers alone would be subject to fines, as I understand it.
Anyways. Working off the same set of legal documents, Torre claims that Ballmer’s buddy Dennis Wong made a donation of just under $2 million to Aspiration in December 2022. The payment to Kawhi followed roughly a week after that, and Aspiration filed for bankruptcy in March 2023. I’ll also note that Wong’s own daughter was working for the company, which just adds to the masterclass in sloppy impropriety here.
Now, to be clear about all this. The NBA has hired a big ol’ white-shoe law firm to get to the bottom of this, and I think we can all safely expect that that investigation will take a long-ass time to produce a report. Until then, we can connect some of these dots ourselves, but they don’t yet prove anything. It sure doesn’t look good. But that’s about all we can say at the moment.
Is that enough? Maybe. I’ve been surprised at the luck of (public) anger about this from within the NBA owner ranks. That could be happening behind closed doors, of course, but I would’ve thought that the pressure from other owners to address this mess with Ballmer might’ve already started by now.
That said, I heard Michael McCann — a sports lawyer whose work I’ve always enjoyed in Sportico — talking about this on Zach Lowe’s podcast, and found a point he made very compelling. Essentially, he made the case that NBA owners have zero incentive to put themselves on the hook for policing the state of their partners’ endorsement deals with their players.
That’s not due diligence that any of these teams really want to be tasked with, and that’s before we consider the possibility that other franchises might have some suspect accounting of their own to hide.
The NBA league office is nominally independent. Practically, though, it is not. How the owners feel about all this will have an outsize impact on how it plays out. I imagine Ballmer’s doing a little internal diplomacy of his own right now, and I’ll be very interested to see how he fares.
🎾 We’re in Barcelona for a wedding right now, and our friends who beat us here were letting us know that the Alcaraz buzz was very real for the final. I can see why. I love Sinner, as you all know, but I think we can still confidently say that Alcaraz at his best still beats Sinner at his best, pretty much every time. My hope is that this latest loss pushes Sinner to make this rivalry closer in the future. He should probably have won the French this year, which would make this all look a little less lopsided, but after a huge win at Wimbledon, he didn’t bring enough to compete at Flushing Meadows. That’ll have to change if he wants to be the top dog. Which, I gather, he does. Man, I’ve loved getting back into tennis with these two.
🦬 Deeply ashamed, as a novice-level Bills fan, to have gone to bed before they mounted the epic comeback against Baltimore. It didn’t even occur to me that they could pull that off. I watched the “Buffalo gives up 40 to the Ravens” game last year. I didn’t think this one could have a different ending. Josh Allen continues to make his case as the best player in the sport. Superhero stuff.
🐻 We talked last week about the bummer that is fans rooting for players to fail. Cards on the table: I have to fight that instinct when it comes to Caleb Williams. Great work by
and the whole Go Long crew on that series. On the real though, I left all that more disillusioned with Ryan Poles than anyone. You be your own judge! Go read that here.📚 Book corner resumes with Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga, who comes recommended by an author named Brandon Taylor whose taste in literature I find I appreciate. It tells a story about a girls’ boarding school in Rwanda, shortly before the ‘94 genocide, and how the social politics of the teachers and students there reflect the disaster that’s about to come. The plot itself is fascinating; sometimes though, and here too, I find I have a little bit of trouble getting into the voice of a translated work. It reads ever so slightly flat. I think that’s a me thing, and you’d rather get to read a book than not. Just pointing out the one thing that bumped me.