Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and his staff had spent the last 12 months loudly insisting they’d done nothing wrong.

The podcast “Pablo Torre Finds Out” first raised questions about payments star forward Kawhi Leonard received from Aspiration Partners without doing any endorsement work to benefit the company on Sept. 3, 2025. The NBA responded by starting an investigation.

In its findings — released Sept. 2 — an independent law firm reported “a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations” that benefited Leonard, who received $66 million in cash and equity from four companies through agreements facilitated by Ballmer and team executives at the request of Leonard’s uncle and then-agent. Those deals violated the league salary cap, which limits how much teams can pay players. The cap is $164.961 million for the coming season.

The Clippers released two statements that same day, protesting the finding and the stiffest sanctions in NBA history, including a $30-million fine and the loss of five future first-round draft picks. In addition, Ballmer, 69, was banned from all league activities for the next year.

Read more:Steve Ballmer apologizes to fans, says Clippers will comply with NBA sanctions

After immediately calling the NBA’s investigation “biased” and vowing to “vigorously challenge these findings and penalties through every avenue available to us,” the Clippers were silent for 11 days.

On Sunday night, they surrendered.

“I accept responsibility as principal owner,” Ballmer said in a three-paragraph, 172-word statement released by the team. “We are committing to put this chapter behind us. We have communicated to the NBA that we are complying with the penalties assessed by the league, have paid the fine, and are moving forward.”

Mark Francis, an associate teaching professor in sports business at the University of Oregon, said Ballmer’s decision to change course was a smart one — since fighting the penalties would only serve to prolong the scandal in the media, damaging the goodwill Ballmer has built up since buying the team in 2014.

“It’s the right thing to do,” he said. “We’re living in times where people don’t take accountability any more and I was actually impressed that he came out with that.

“Once they acknowledge fault, show some remorse, those kinds of things, then sometimes the penalties will be reduced.”

Read more:Swanson: Clippers avoid a death penalty with Kawhi Leonard trade, but only if they clean house

Daniel Durbin, director of the USC Annenberg Institute of Sports Media and Society, agreed, saying the original pushback “was all lawyer speak” while the decision to accept the penalties was prudent.

“It is a pretty stiff penalty. You’ve got a problem, just pay it off and get rid of it,” Durbin said. “And in a certain respect, Ballmer can pay this and move on. So it may well be for him … it’s not worth it to keep fighting, keep wasting money on that.”

Bloomberg estimates Ballmer’s net worth at $173 billion, making the former Microsoft chief executive the world’s ninth-richest person. He earns $1.2 billion annually from his Microsoft stock dividends alone.

In addition to the loss of draft picks and the fine and suspension levied on Ballmer, the NBA suspended Gillian Zucker, the Clippers president of business operations, for one year without pay and suspended Lawrence Frank, the team’s president of basketball operations, for six months without pay.

Read more:Read the NBA's investigation of the Clippers, Steve Ballmer, Kawhi Leonard

Leonard, a seven-time all-star forward and Southern California native, was traded back to the Toronto Raptors this summer. He agreed to pay a $700,000 fine for his role in the Clippers saga and did not contest the sanctions leveled against him but issued a statement of his own in which he placed the blame squarely on the Clippers.

“I accept full responsibility for lapses in judgment by people within my inner circle and regret the distraction this situation has caused the fans and my family,” the statement read. “I entered into my contract with the Clippers as well as the agreements in question in good faith, fully committed to fulfilling my obligations and with no knowledge of any intent on anyone’s part to circumvent the salary cap.”

The Raptors temporarily froze the Leonard trade after the NBA announced Toronto would inherit any penalties assessed to Leonard following its investigation. With Ballmer accepting the NBA penalties, the trade is now moving forward and the Clippers will receive All-Star forward Brandon Ingram, shooting guard Gradey Dick, two first-round draft picks, a pick swap and two second-round picks, building blocks that could help the franchise move forward amid the penalties.

Ballmer’s capitulation may actually be seen as a positive to some Clippers fans, Durbin suggested.

Read more:Plaschke: NBA drops the hammer on The Cheatin’ Clippers, and they can't shed the stink

“What did he confess to? Trying to kind of work around the rules to make the Clippers a championship team,” he said. “There’s a certain sense in which to Clippers fans the entire brouhaha is proof that he’s trying really hard. So while yes, he did break the rules … saying that you broke some rules to try to make your team a championship team is not in and of itself something that’s going to drive away the fan base.”

“It’s not a good thing,” Durbin added. “It’s an admission that maybe he went too far. … And he was willing to pay to try to make the team better.”

Francis isn’t so sure.

“I think that’s a stretch,” he said. “To violate the payroll system they have, it’s a serious offense. The owners are the ones that have pushed for these cost controls and they have to live up to them.”

Read more:Swanson: Kawhi Leonard is a Hall of Fame scam artist who deserves Clippers fans' boos

The question now becomes can the Clippers actually become better as they deal with the penalties.

L.A.’s No. 2 NBA team, well behind the Lakers in popularity and success, the Clippers have finished higher than fourth in the Pacific Division standings just once since Ballmer’s first season as owner in 2014-15 and have reached the conference finals only once. The team finished 10^th in the division last season, missing the postseason, and it hasn’t advanced beyond the first round of the NBA playoffs since 2021.

But the Lakers are in transition under new ownership and are without LeBron James for the first time since 2018, leaving the Clippers with a narrow window to win over new fans.

“They have to be able to threaten to be a championship team before you can say that they can take advantage of this moment,” Durbin said. “There’s the opportunity theoretically, but it’s really more about how smart they are on the draft picks, how smart they are on building the team.”

Times Sports Editor Iliana Limón Romero and staff writer Mirjam Swanson contributed to this report.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

The summer of 2023 was a pivotal one for the Golden State Warriors. After a volatile season started with Draymond Green punching Jordan Poole during a preseason practice, the team’s title defense ended with a second-round playoff loss. Poole and Wiggins got contract extensions in the wake of the championship, while Green did not, despite holding a player option for 2023-24. The Warriors ended up severing one branch of their two timelines, shipping Poole and 2022 draft picks Ryan Rollins and Patrick Baldwin, Jr. out of town and adding Chris Paul.

Eventually, the team also gave Green a four-year contract worth $100M, but not without some drama in the negotiations. According to Green, he was ready to join Golden State’s rivals and try his hand and whooping that trick in Memphis before the Dubs upped their offer.

Was it a negotiating ploy? Green claims he wasn’t bluffing, and that the Grizzlies had offered $10M more than the Warriors’ original offer. He did need to get his old team to participate in a sign-and-trade to get that extra money, and that’s when the Warriors raised their offer, while also reportedly “moving the goalposts” in trade talks with the Grizzlies, according to Green.

It’s not clear what the Grizzlies would have done to make the money work in such a deal, or when the sign-and-trade talks happened. Memphis eventually traded for Marcus Smart and jettisoned Green’s arch-enemy Dillon Brooks and Green came back to the Warriors for almost the exact same money and years as his previous deal.

The fit in Memphis would have made a lot of sense. Green may have antagonized the fans of Memphis over the years, but he could have complemented Jaren Jackson, Jr. well, essentially playing center defensively so Jackson could roam, block shots, and continue not to get any rebounds. Though Draymond has never been specifically suspended for grit or for grinding, he does have the lunch pail/bully ball/regular bullying attitude that the classic Zach Randolph-Mike Conley-Tony Allen-Marc Gasol Grizzlies teams embraced.

Green’s foray into free agency was similar to what happened with Andre Iguodala in the summer of 2017. Iguodala met with the Houston Rockets, another team the Warriors had recently beaten in the playoffs, and eventually got the Warriors to up their offer to three years and $48M before he came back. Two years later, they’d sacrifice a future first-round pick (which eventually became Bub Carrington) to dump Iggy on the Grizzlies, where he never reported and kicked off a weird one-sided feud from Brooks and his teammates.

Iguodala knew exactly what he was doing, however. After he held out for most of the season, the Grizzlies traded Iguodala to the Miami Heat, who tacked on an extra year to Iguodala’s contract for $15M. He went to his sixth straight NBA Finals that fall and came back to the Warriors in 2021 in time to make it seven Finals in eight years (and four rings). Now he has a venture capital firm, after being an early investor in companies like Zoom, Allbirds, and Casper mattresses.

Would Green’s presence have helped the Grizzlies? They fell off a cliff in 2023-24 thanks to a massive suspension for Ja Morant and injuries to almost the entire roster, including Smart, Desmond Bane, and Steven Adams. Maybe Green could have punched Morant every time he talked about waving a gun around?

Ultimately, Green used the same technique in negotiating with the Warriors that he does in guarding much larger centers in the paint: Leverage. The Grizzlies, the Warriors, and the world of podcasting were never the same.

Knicks fans can start making their plans to see the champions. 

Single-game tickets at Madison Square Garden officially went on sale Monday in the first of three waves. 

Monday’s wave was for participants in the Knicks Fan First program who are Chase cardholders.

All other Knicks Fan First members can begin to make purchases Tuesday.

Tickets will open to the general public Wednesday. 

Tickets for home games after last season’s championship run are dynamically priced. 

The Knicks open their season in a highly anticipated showdown with LeBron James and the 76ers at the Garden on Oct. 20, but not before raising their championship banner.

They will feature in 34 nationally televised games — the maximum number allowed.

The Knicks also play in all of the league’s marquee slots, notably hosting the Spurs on Christmas Day. 

For the last 17 years, Stephen Curry has put together a Hall of Fame career that has marked him as one of the greatest shooters to play the game of basketball.

Now fans have the chance to relive it, plus more. But this time, on the IMAX screen.

On Monday, ESPN Films released a trailer for their latest documentary, “Portrait of an Artist,” which is set to be released in IMAX theaters on October 9.

The trailer began with the sound of a basketball being bounced in an empty gym, followed by an aerial view of the skyline district in San Francisco.

During the shot, Curry’s voice chimed in and said, “I’ve been around basketball my whole life,” Curry says. “But the more I played. The more I started to see it differently.”

“For me, it’s never just been a game. It always like more like an art.”

After Curry is done speaking, the documentary starts to show clips of Curry from when he was a baby, shooting a basketball for the first time, to clips of him during the present era.

A voice appears in the trailer and says, “We all admire artists; they play so effortlessly.”

Another audio clip emerges and says, “Every great artist has that something, that signature where the world kind of stops and says, ‘Yeah that’s them.”

In the later part of the documentary, it highlights some of his lowest of low moments, like injuries he suffered during the early stages of his career.

It also highlights some of his highs, like when he became the first player to shoot 4,000 3-pointers on March 13, 2025.

“There’s a rhythm to it,” Curry says in the trailer.

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Throughout the trailer, there is a blend of clips throughout it that include musicians like Freddie Mercury of the band Queen, with their iconic performance at “Live Aid” at Wembley Stadium in 1985. It also includes a blend of composers and other musicians playing instruments.

The video ends with Curry saying, “This is what I was meant to do,” followed by famed sports commentator Kevin Harlan saying, “Truly the portrait of an artist. Unbelievable.”