Category: NBA

The NBA's quest to "create an All-Star experience that we can be proud of and our players can be proud of" continues in earnest and with a new partner.

NBC joins the effort to inject life into what has become a moribund endeavor. Under the NBA's new broadcast deal, the network will air the Feb. 15 game that will be hosted by the Clippers at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles.

Commissioner Adam Silver and others in the know floated a trial balloon Wednesday evening, revealing that the 2026 All-Star Game is likely to be a round-robin tournament consisting of three eight-player teams — two composed of U.S.-born players and one of players from other countries.

The NBA and the players' union presented the format to the league's competition committee on Wednesday and the response was positive, according to several media outlets.

Silver acknowledged that the convoluted format used this year "was a miss." Three eight-man all-star squads and a fourth team of rookies and sophomores played a tournament of untimed games to a target score of 40 points.

Read more:NBA probing allegations that firm paid Kawhi Leonard $28 million to evade the salary cap. Clippers strongly deny claims

Pitting U.S. All-Stars against those from other countries has long been an appealing concept to Silver. However, the league is about 70% American and 30% international, complicating a traditional one-game All-Star format. Creating two teams of eight U.S. all-stars and one team of eight from other countries would solve the numbers issue. The three teams would play one another in 12-minute-quarter round-robin games.

The impetus to devise a new All-Star Game format escalated when the final score in 2024 was a ridiculous 211-186. There was no defense for a game in which nobody played any defense.

Asked about the lack of effort in preventing the other team from scoring, then-Lakers center Anthony Davis shrugged and said, “It’s an All-Star Game."

The simple East-West format of that game was an effort to get away from the musical performances, prolonged introductions and rosters drafted by team captains that had plagued the event for years.

Silver was searching for a way to generate effort from the players and excitement from the crowd, saying before the game, "we’re not necessarily looking for players to go out there as if it’s the Finals, but we need players to play defense, we need them to care about this game. And the feeling was that maybe — and I’ll take responsibility for it; as you know, I used to run something called NBA Entertainment — that we’d gotten carried away a little bit with the entertainment aspect.”

Read more:Lakers brass shows up at EuroBasket 2025 in Poland, watch Luka Doncic's Slovenia team lose

A combined 397 points didn't cut it, especially the part about playing defense. The format tried in March was a flop, with Silver admitting, "We’re a bit back to the drawing board."

Should the competition committee green-light the new format, fans in L.A. will be able to decide in February whether the NBA has finally created an All-Star event that appeals to players enough for them to make an effort.

Television ratings might increase simply because the All-Star Game will be aired on NBC during the Milan Winter Olympics. The game will be played in the afternoon rather than the evening and is expected to be followed by NBC's daily Olympics prime-time show from Milan.

"[The Olympics] present an enormous opportunity for us to do something with an international competition instead of the traditional All-Star formats that we've used," Silver said last spring.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

The Clippers forcefully denied allegations detailed in a podcast published on Wednesday that a discredited global tree-planting company paid Kawhi Leonard $28 million to pad the star forward's contract and skirt the NBA salary cap. However, the NBA told The Times that it will start an investigation.

Investigative journalist Pablo Torre of the Athletic said during "Pablo Finds Out" that he reviewed numerous documents and conducted interviews with former employees of Aspiration Partners, the sustainability services firm that recently declared bankruptcy. Co-founder Joseph Sanberg agreed to plead guilty Aug. 21 to a scheme to defraud investors and lenders of more than $248 million.

During Aspiration's bankruptcy proceedings, documents emerged citing KL2 Aspire as a creditor owed $7 million, one of four yearly payments of that amount agreed upon in a 2022 contract. KL2 is a limited liability company that names Leonard — whose jersey number is 2 — as its manager.

Aspiration was partially funded by a $50-million investment from Clippers owner Steve Ballmer. It is not known whether Ballmer was aware of or played a role in facilitating the employment agreement between Aspiration and Leonard.

Torre revealed during the podcast that he did not find evidence of any marketing or endorsement work done by Leonard for Aspiration. The only connection he found between the player and the company came in a 2023 tweet by the Clippers that read, "Happy Birthday, Kawhi! For every comment/retweet, @Aspiration will plant one tree for Kawhi's birthday!"

Happy Birthday, Kawhi!🥳

For every comment/retweet, @Aspiration will plant one tree for Kawhi's birthday! pic.twitter.com/dHOS8sgyWT

— LA Clippers (@LAClippers) June 29, 2023

The NBA said in a statement to The Times that "we are aware of this morning’s media report regarding the LA Clippers and are commencing an investigation.” However, the Clippers told The Times that they could prove that Torre's allegations are false.

“Neither Mr. Ballmer nor the Clippers circumvented the salary cap or engaged in any misconduct related to Aspiration,” the Clippers statement said. “Any contrary assertion is provably false: The team ended its relationship with Aspiration years ago, during the 2022-23 season, when Aspiration defaulted on its obligations.

"Neither the Clippers nor Mr. Ballmer was aware of any improper activity by Aspiration or its co-founder until after the government instituted its investigation. The team and Mr. Ballmer stand ready to assist law enforcement in any way they can.”

A former Aspiration finance department employee whose voice was modulated on Torre's podcast said that when they noticed the shockingly large fee paid to Leonard, they were told that, "If I had any questions about it, essentially don’t because it was to circumvent the salary cap, LOL. There was lots of LOL when things were shared.”

Other celebrities paid to endorse Aspiration and its tree-planting operation included Robert Downey Jr., Leonardo DiCaprio and Drake. The finance department employee said none of them received anything close to the payment given to Leonard.

"Every other celebrity endorsement combined would not have met even a quarter of Kawhi Leonard’s endorsement,” the employee said.

Leonard joined the Clippers in July 2019 on a three-year, $103-million contract after leading the Toronto Raptors to the NBA title. He re-upped for four years and $176.3 million in 2021, then signed a three-year, $153-million extension last year.

Read more:Shai Gilgeous-Alexander leads OKC to NBA title, and the Clippers must be cringing

When the Clippers landed Leonard in 2019, the NBA was stunned: In a matter of hours, the Clippers had traded for Paul George and signed Leonard, outmaneuvering the Lakers and other suitors.

Suspicions were raised that Ballmer had somehow circumvented the salary cap and compensated Leonard with more than just the max NBA contract. However, the NBA investigated Leonard’s advisor Dennis Robertson — also known as Uncle Dennis — and determined the Clippers had not granted Leonard impermissible benefits.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is adamantly opposed to a team doing an end run around the salary cap with creative under-the-table payments to players, perhaps contributing to the swift acknowledgment that the accusations concerning Leonard have triggered a league investigation.

Under the terms of the NBA collective bargaining agreement, the Clippers could be fined up to $4.5 million and stripped of a first-round draft pick for a first offense if they were found to have circumvented the salary cap.

Six years later, the deal for George and signing of Leonard are viewed in a different light because the Clippers never advanced to the NBA Finals and this season, the team watched assets they surrendered to acquire George — including league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — lift the Oklahoma City Thunder to the championship.

Get the best, most interesting and strangest stories of the day from the L.A. sports scene and beyond from our newsletter The Sports Report.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

The Los Angeles Clippers and their owner, Steve Ballmer, have denied allegations the team’s star forward, Kawhi Leonard, was paid $28m for a job that doesn’t exist.

Journalist Pablo Torre laid out the allegations in his podcast on Wednesday. Torre, citing legal documents, claims Ballmer employed Leonard for a non-existent role in one of his companies to circumvent the NBA salary cap, which punishes teams for spending too much on player salaries.

Torre claims that Ballmer partially funded a now defunct tree-planting company called Aspiration. That company then allegedly entered into a $28m agreement with KL2 Aspire, LLC, a company owned by Leonard.

Torre says he could find no evidence that Leonard had ever performed any work for Aspiration, and there was a clause in the contract between KL2 Aspire and Aspiration effectively allowed Leonard to be paid even if he did no work. Another clause said the deal would be voided if Leonard left the Clippers. One former employee of Aspiration told Torre he had heard the deal with Leonard had been set up to “circumvent the salary cap.”

The Clippers and Ballmer denied the allegations in a statement released to Torre. “Neither Mr Ballmer nor the Clippers circumvented the salary cap or engaged in any misconduct related to Aspiration,” the statement said. “Any contrary assertion is provably false.”

The NBA investigated Leonard’s advisor, Dennis Robertson, in 2019 and found the Clippers had not granted the player any impermissible benefits when they pursued him in free agency. Leonard, a six-time All-Star, joined the Clippers in July 2019 after leading the Toronto Raptors to the NBA title.

The NBA is yet to comment on Torre’s story, but has said in the past it would reopen the investigation into Robertson if new evidence emerged.

Under the terms of the NBA collective bargaining agreement, the Clippers could be fined up to $4.5m for a first offense if they attempted to circumvent the salary cap. They could also be docked a first-round draft pick.

Ramp to Camp: What's one more move Celtics should make before season? originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston

OK, here’s the situation: Brad Stevens went away on a week’s vacation and he left you the keys to the Celtics’ brand-new roster. Would he mind a deal? Well, of course not.

Back in July, after an initial batch of roster tinkering saw the Celtics trade away Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday in a quest to dip below the second apron, Stevens suggested he’d be content if the roster in that moment was the roster that Boston carried into the offseason.

The Celtics have made six roster transactions since that declaration — albeit mostly tinkering on the back end of the roster and finalizing their two-way deals — but that maneuvering also included trading away the only player received in the Porzingis swap (Georges Niang).

Which is to say, even as the 2025-26 season approaches, this Celtics’ roster hardly feels set in stone. The team might have additional motivation to tinker depending on how the season plays out.

For Day 3 of our Ramp to Camp series, we asked our panel to channel their inner Stevens and consider if there’s one more move they’d make for the Celtics before the season starts. Are our Armchair Brads comfortable with the team’s frontcourt depth chart? Do our Virtual Brads see Anfernee Simons as a long-term fit for this roster?

While the next big transaction feels more likely to come closer to the February trade deadline, this is the time of year when teams need to take a long look at their roster and decide if this is the group they’re content to roll with. Given the absence of Jayson Tatum to start the season and some of the talent drain that occurred this summer, the Celtics can take a bit of a wait-and-see approach, but they also have to be opportunistic with eyes towards building the next iteration of a championship-caliber roster.

My goal: The Celtics sit about $12 million away from clearing the luxury tax. Even if it’s sometimes difficult to see a path toward resetting the repeater penalties by getting under (and staying under) the tax in one of the next two seasons, at least you put yourself in position to ponder that option by getting there this season. 

So, while we’re content to carry Simons into the season, we’re examining deals that send out Simons while trying to 1) Bring back at least one player who could be a high-level role player on a championship team and 2) Cut salary with the goal of eventually getting below the tax after all deadline maneuvering is complete.

Since no one ever knows what exactly the Bulls are doing, we’re calling them to see if they think Simons can help in their annual quest to land a play-in berth. Even after the Bulls sign Josh Giddey to a long-term deal, Chicago has ample room to take on salary. Would they take on Simons’ money for a package that includes something like Ayo Dosunmu, Jalen Smith, and Dalen Terry?

The Celtics shed nearly $6 million off the books with this deal and would have pathways to eventually get below the tax (particularly if they could move a player like Terry to a third team without taking back salary). Boston gets a look at Dosunmu, someone who better fits the mold of a long-term piece, and can decide if it want to pay his next deal. 

Speaking of Bulls moves… That’s where our panel starts as well:

Josh Canu, Media Editor

Trade Anfernee Simons for Nikola Vucevic.

Both players are on expiring contracts, the Bulls get a younger player, and the Celtics get a starting center and some cap relief as well. Not the sexiest move, but a move that works and is attainable. 

Max Lederman, Content Producer

I’d pay Isaiah Thomas to be a part of the organization, either as a player or on the coaching staff.

I never felt right about how things turned out for IT, and bringing him back to Boston would be good karma.

Darren Hartwell, Managing Editor

The easy answer is trading Anfernee Simons and his $27.6 million expiring contract to shed salary. The hard part is finding a deal that makes sense.

After tinkering with NBA trade machines, we’ll go with a three-team proposal from Bleacher Report’s Andy Bailey that sends Simons to Toronto and Terance Mann and Ochai Agbaji to Boston.

Michael Hurley, Web Producer

I’m inviting all of my friends to the Garden for some pickup basketball, first and foremost. After that, I don’t think I’m going too crazy.

The chances of going on a title run without Tatum are minuscule, if we’re being honest. So, why push the envelope when I could reset some financials and build for the following season?

If I’m doing anything, though, I’m challenging Joe Mazzulla to just try for one game to tell his team to take a normal number of 3s, just to see what happens. It’s possible I’d be engaged in some hand-to-hand combat as a result.

Sean McGuire, Web Producer

Brad Stevens said it was unlikely Al Horford would return. That was months ago. It feels like it’s a done deal and Horford is headed to Golden State. But since it hasn’t happened yet, I’m going with Big Al.

If I was running the front office, I’m making it work with Horford, an all-time Celtic and impactful contributor who would improve the front court in 2025-26. (I hope this doesn’t age as poorly as it very well could.)

Kevin Miller, VP, Content

I’m not sure there’s anything Stevens can really do. Adding another big would make sense, but I don’t see any realistic options.

I’m keeping Simons to see how he works in this offense for first half of season.

Adam Hart, EP, Content Strategy

Make some room for Malik Beasley and add him on a discount prove-it deal.

Why Draymond Green, Jimmy Butler's joint offseason workout matters for Warriors originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area

Summer, in technical terms, still has almost three more weeks until the lights go out and fall rears its head from the shadows. Draymond Green doesn’t ascribe to that calendar. 

It ended with the passing of Labor Day, he announced Tuesday on Threads, his apparent preferred social media website. 

The offseason still very much is ongoing for the Warriors as a team that hasn’t made a move more than two months since free agency began. The roster only consists of nine players. But players are beginning to trickle in through Chase Center to work out and scrimmage with training camp starting at the end of the month. 

Before veteran stars Green and Jimmy Butler make their way to the Warriors’ home arena, the two shared the floor in Los Angeles for a workout at the end of August. Butler shared photos and videos of the workout Sunday with a 20-slide post to his Instagram, using the caption “whatever @money23green said on the last slide.” And on that slide, Green made the same prediction he proclaimed during NBA All-Star Weekend less than two weeks after the Warriors acquired Butler from the Miami Heat at the trade deadline. 

“We gettin’ that b—h this year,” Green said, referring to the Warriors winning the championship. 

Green guaranteed the Warriors would win the championship on Feb. 16 as part of his TNT broadcasting duties. They, of course, did not. The Warriors went on a tear after Butler’s arrival, but then lost in the second round of the playoffs against the Minnesota Timberwolves without an injured Steph Curry. 

About a month after his bold words on national TV, Green made an admission to NBC Sports Bay Area’s Monte Poole and Kerith Burke on the “Dubs Talk” podcast, saying he likes the Warriors’ chances at a championship even more the next season in 2025-26. 

“I think coming back next year, I think we’ll be even in a better position than we were this year,” he reiterated at his exit interview press conference after the season. “Number one, because you can manage the season better, which helps when you’re trying to compete for a championship, especially at the ages we’re at. It helps a lot.” 

The ages of the Warriors’ top players – Curry, Butler and Green – are a talking point that isn’t going away. The facts are, a team leaning on this old of a trio has never won a championship. Butler and Green working out together isn’t going to guarantee a parade down Market Street. 

The workout and increased chemistry is what Butler promised, though.

“Now you’ve got a whole offseason,” Butler said the same day as Green at his exit interview press conference. “I get to be around my guys in the offseason. We’re going to get to vacay together. We’re going to get our kids together. We’re going to get to train together, build even more chemistry and then take this thing into training camp and into this next year, this next season, and do what we set out to do.” 

The worry in bringing Butler into the Warriors’ locker room was if the big personalities of him and Green would clash. The opposite happened, at least in the first chapter. The next chapter appears to have begun with an even greater sense of commitment and understanding of each other. 

Which will be critical for the Warriors both at the start of the season, as well as a playoff push later on. Led by Curry, Butler and Green, Golden State badly needs to get off to a strong start this season. The Warriors begin their campaign against LeBron James, Luka Dončić and the Los Angeles Lakers on the road and then welcome Nikola Jokić and the new-look Denver Nuggets to San Francisco. 

They have five sets of back-to-backs in their first 17 games, making the Jonathan Kuminga situation that much more interesting with the need for a young scorer helping an older team on nights that look like scheduled losses. 

Green played every game after the Butler trade. The Warriors went 23-7 to end the regular season in games Butler and Green played together, and they had the best defensive rating (109.0) in the NBA. 

“Great,” Green said at the end of Butler’s Instagram post when asked how he’s feeling. “We ‘bout six weeks out. Right where I need to be, baby.”

Replicating those same results, a 76.7 win percentage, isn’t going to happen for an entire season. These Warriors aren’t going to reel off 63 wins. Even if a workout can’t predict a large number in the win column, the Warriors need Butler and Green to be the tone-setters while Curry runs the show.

Whether they’ll have enough gas in the tank to last is a whole other question.

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Where Jonathan Kuminga's contract saga with Warriors stands entering September originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area

The ongoing saga between the Warriors and restricted free agent Jonathan Kuminga has persisted past Labor Day. NBA training camp is in four weeks, and the Oct. 1 deadline for Kuminga to accept the qualifying offer is under a month away. So, where are the two sides?

Still miles apart it appears. 

The one-year, $7.9 million qualifying offer remains the most attractive offer to Kuminga at the moment, sources continue to tell NBC Sports Bay Area. The Warriors have offered a two-year contract worth roughly $45 million, but are holding strong to a team option for the second year, while Kuminga and his camp have made it clear they want a player option for Year 2.

To ensure Kuminga doesn’t sign the qualifying offer, which essentially would eliminate any option of trading him this season and severely hurt roster building, the Warriors will have to convince him what they’re proposing is that much better than the last resort. The first way to do that is ceding the team option for a player option. The second is simply to give him more money up front, making the team option less of a sticking point in the end.

Year 1 of the Warriors’ offer is $21.75 million, per sources, but because of the base salary compensation rule, Kuminga’s outgoing salary is equal to half of that. So, much of this entire situation comes down to control. 

Through four years, Kuminga and the Warriors have yet to find common ground on who he presently is as a player, who he can be with more opportunities and who he will be in the future. The way this offseason has played out only has furthered Kuminga’s desire to control his own destiny and how his future plays out. Kuminga wants to make sure that no matter who his next employer is, he’s comfortable and confident he is being set up for success from the start.

There has been confusion as to why Kuminga would hold steady to the inherent no-trade clause of a qualifying offer, as well as a player option for the second year with the assumption he wants to be somewhere else aside from the Warriors. Kuminga doesn’t want to be used as a “pawn” for a team where he has seen himself as the scapegoat, and he still doesn’t fully know what his role will be going into his fifth NBA season with the likelihood that he still isn’t a starter and might not close games.

Signing the qualifying offer is a risk for Kuminga. His agent, Aaron Turner, isn’t discrediting that. However, the risk is much more on the Warriors. 

With an aging core of Steph Curry, Jimmy Butler and Draymond Green, letting Kuminga sign the qualifying offer would take away the Warriors’ best asset at the NBA trade deadline for another big-time name. Kuminga then would have zero trade value because no team can extend off that. Golden State loses his Bird Rights, Kuminga’s Warriors tenure would be done after this next season without getting anything back for him after spurning multiple trade offers for him in previous years, and the situation would make Kuminga a distraction, at least in a media sense, all season because of the nature of the qualifying offer. 

The nightmare scenario the qualifying offer presents digs a far bigger hole for the Warriors than it does for Kuminga. 

The main example of the qualifying offer risks for Kuminga is Nerlens Noel. The Dallas Mavericks in the summer of 2017 initially offered Noel a four-year, $70 million contract that he spurned in hopes of signing a maximum contract offer that never came. He then instead signed a $4.1 million qualifying offer with the Mavs, but greatly disappointed in an injury-filled season where Noel only played 30 games and averaged 4.4 points. 

Noel signed with the Oklahoma City Thunder the next offseason on a two-year, veteran’s minimum contract.

Here’s the difference: Noel already missed his entire rookie year because of a torn ACL, and missed 31 games the season going into his contract dispute. At the time of turning down $70 million, Noel had averaged 10.0 points and 7.5 rebounds per game while averaging 27.6 minutes. He never was the scoring option Kuminga is and was in a different contractual world than him.

Kuminga doesn’t have a $66 million gap between the contract he’s being offered and the qualifying offer. The gap really is a little more than $13 million when looking at the one-year qualifying offer and the first year of the contract the Warriors currently have on the table. He surely would have insurance policies to lessen the risk, too. The former No. 7 overall pick turns 23 years old on Oct. 6 and is confident his next contract easily will exceed $13 million annually.

The Sacramento Kings and Phoenix Suns both offered Kuminga long-term contracts, empowering him with a starting role and making it known he’d be their power forward of the future. Contracts from the Kings and Suns included a player option, according to sources, but both were dependent on the Warriors agreeing to a sign-and-trade that never enticed their front office enough to do so.

None of the NBA’s four restricted free agents – Kuminga, Josh Giddey, Cam Thomas and Quinten Grimes – have signed a contract yet. The first domino must fall soon. Nothing is close between the Warriors and Kuminga, sources say, with both sides waiting for someone to blink first.

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