It’s been 11 months since the NBA opened a formal investigation into the Los Angeles Clippers for salary cap circumvention, and somehow Adam Silver has only made it worse. We are no closer to knowing what exactly happened, there’s backbiting occurring between the NBA and the media — but more concerning is a pervasive opacity shrouding the process, pronounced enough that it feels less like the league is leading an investigation and more like it’s trying to navigate a balancing act that will satiate the public’s need for answers while not angering Clippers’ owner Steve Ballmer.

Pablo Torre initially broke the story last year, which alleged that the Clippers used a now-defunct sponsor to funnel money to Kawhi Leonard as a fake employee, allowing the team to exceed his max-level contract. The Torre report initially got the ball rolling and led to the NBA investigation — which is ongoing now.

Since that point, the NBA has largely been quiet, Torre has continued to gather more details, expanding on his reporting, and on Monday ESPN dropped a story that intimated the investigation was coming to a close, functionally absolving Ballmer of responsibility as a result — which the NBA then refuted. It’s all a mess, so let’s try to make sense of this from all angles right now.

Pablo Torre’s reporting

In September of 2025 Torre reported that Leonard had a $28M no-show deal with Aspiration, a green energy company, which functionally listed Leonard as an employee and spokesperson — when in reality he didn’t do any work for Aspiration. This was sourced through numerous ex-employees of Aspiration, who spoke to Torre anonymously and said it was a known secret inside the company that Leonard was being paid under the table on behalf of the Clippers

In August of 2026 a new report from Torre noted that Leonard had a second undisclosed endorsement deal with Daktronics, the company that made the video board for the Clippers. The nature of this deal has not been disclosed, though Torre says it was also sourced through employees of Daktronics.

ESPN’s reporting

Initially, ESPN was extremely quiet after Torre’s initial report. Then, in September of 2025 reporter Ramona Shelburne conducted a sit-down interview with Steve Ballmer that allowed him to explain the Clippers’ side of things, which was devoid of any hard-hitting questions. It essentially allowed Ballmer to absolve himself of responsibility, saying that he didn’t know anything about the deals — other than the fact that he made introductions between Aspiration and Leonard.

Reporting on ESPN’s side was quiet until this week, when a story was published by Don Van Natta Jr., Baxter Holmes, and Shelburne — which indicated that the NBA found no wrongdoing by Ballmer. Instead, the penalty was likely going to be focused on “failure to supervise,” saying that unnamed Clippers employees operated autonomously. In addition, the report indicated that the league and Clippers were working together on a resolution to the in investigation — which frankly should never, ever happen.

“The league presented initial findings of its investigation, led by law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, to the Clippers in late July, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. In recent days, both sides have been negotiating a resolution to the investigation, the people said.”

The NBA is denying the ESPN report, which we’ll get to in a moment.

The Clippers’ side of things

From the first report, the Clippers have alleged no wrongdoing. Ballmer has positioned himself as simply a man who made introductions between Leonard and companies he did business with, having no knowledge a deal took place to pay Leonard. They’ve characterized this as a normal procedure for NBA teams to make these introductions, which is accurate — and has started a firestorm over the possibility that organizing business connections could be considered salary cap circumvention in the future.

The NBA’s side of things

Adam Silver has dragged this process out for almost a year. That enabled the Clippers to retain the No. 5 overall pick in the 2026 NBA Draft without punishment, while also allowing them to find a trade that will send Kawhi Leonard to the Toronto Raptors once the salary cap investigation is complete.

A statement by the NBA late Monday vehemently denied the ESPN report, but failed to address specific details of what the league denied.

The NBA and spokesman Mike Bass has now released the following statement, saying that ESPN’s story on the investigations has “numerous and significant inaccuracies.” pic.twitter.com/5hioJPAzD7

— Brett Siegel (@BrettSiegelNBA) August 17, 2026

Once again, the NBA is asking for patience from the public on an investigation that has taken longer than it ever should have, essentially saying we’ll get all the answers once the investigation is complete. Still, there is no timetable on how long this is going to continue to drag on.

The factors at play now

One of the key reasons Adam Silver is so reviled as NBA commissioner is that his approach to everything when it comes to the league is that profit and expansion is more important than anything else, even competitive balance or fairness. Silver is light on punishment, even in the case of former Suns owner Robert Sarver who was fined $10M and suspended for one year after an investigation by the league found that he had routinely and often been racist, misogynistic, and inappropriate in the workplace. The punishment stopped short of forcing Sarver to sell the team, which he later did of his own will.

Sarver was a small player in the NBA’s circle of important owners. Steve Ballmer is a whale. The former Microsoft executive is the richest NBA owner by a significant margin, with a net worth of $152B — while also being critical to Silver’s goals when it comes to using the myriad business relationships Ballmer has to further the goals of the league.

Essentially Ballmer is the last owner Silver would ever want to punish for anything. As commissioner he doesn’t want to bite the hand that feeds, but these allegations are extremely damaging to the perception of the NBA. If the result of this investigation is too soft it will further erode public faith in the NBA as a whole, but too harsh at it will anger the league’s cash cow.

That balance is reportedly being worked on behind closed doors, according to the ESPN report from Monday. It makes it seem as if the Clippers have been found guilty of cap subversion; everyone in the room knows it, but now they are desperately trying to find a resolution together that will satiate the public without damaging Ballmer’s reputation or hurting his team too much. With pockets as deep as Ballmer’s, there’s functionally no fine imaginable that would be large enough to hurt him. Even if we imagine the same $10M fine that Sarver received, it would be the equivalent of 0.06% of his net worth — the same as a $60 fine for someone who earns $100,000 a year.

We all know what should happen. If the Clippers actively engaged in salary cap circumvention at any level, then they should be docked draft picks or forced to play under the NBA’s luxury tax for a set period. That will not happen. Silver does not want to harm the Clippers, not really. Nor will there be any suspension of Kawhi Leonard beyond a slap on the wrist, because to do more could void the trade to Toronto and hurt the Clippers as a result as well.

Nobody is going to be happy with the result of all this, except for Adam Silver and Steve Ballmer. That is how this is being engineered, and it’s by design. It’s a feature of the Silver-run NBA, not a bug.

The NBA was verging on being a failing business when Jerry Buss bought the Los Angeles Lakers from Jack Kent Cooke in 1979 for $67.5 million. Pro basketball only had a small television footprint at the time, attendance was falling, teams were claiming to lose money, and the league couldn’t untangle itself from the perception that its players would rather do an eight ball than dive for loose balls. The NBA’s meteoric rise over the next 20 years happened for a variety of reasons, but the story of its success goes hand-in-hand with Buss turning the Lakers into arguably the premier franchise in American sports.

The Lakers drafted Magic Johnson about a month after Buss’ acquisition closed, and the rest is history. Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar led Los Angeles to five championships, and when they were done, it didn’t take the Lakers long to reboot around Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, and Phil Jackson for another five championships. The Lakers were just about a model franchise until Buss died in 2013 and left the team to his six children. Since then, the team has a sub-.500 cumulative record, one championship, and a behind-the-scenes power struggle among the siblings worthy of prestige TV.

The Buss family drama should have ended when the siblings agreed to sell the franchise to Mark Walter for $10 billion last year. Only one problem: that sale included a provision that said Jeanie Buss would continue to serve as the team’s governor for five years. That seemed like a pretty sweet deal for Jeanie until Walter turned around and flipped the franchise to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger earlier this month for $12.5 billion. Jeanie’s place with the franchise going forward seemed to be in peril after that deal, and it got even weirder on Monday.

ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that the Buss siblings sold off the remaining 17.8% of the franchise it owns to Kushner and Iger. Five of the siblings wanted to sell. Jeanie didn’t. Jeanie’s lawyers are now arguing that the siblings cannot legally sell their shares without Jeanie’s approval because it goes against the family trust, according to a report by CNBC.

The Lakers finally thought they were out of this mess when Walter bought the team last year. The backstabbing between the Buss siblings had been legendary since their father died. Jeanie fired her brother Jim Buss in 2017 and replaced him with Magic Johnson as team president. Jim and his brother Johnny Buss then unsuccessfully tried to overthrow Jeanie by kicking her off the board of directors, but it went against the terms of the trust. Jeanie responded by filing a restraining order against her brothers. The end result was that Jeanie would serve as the controlling owner as long as the family owned the Lakers. Jeanie blessed the sale to Walter a year ago under the condition that she would have a few years left as governor. Now all that appears to be out the window pending even more lawsuits.

Lakers fans thought they had a dream ownership situation when Walter agreed to buy the team a year ago. He had been a terrific owner for MLB’s Los Angeles Dodgers, spending a record amount of money on contracts that helped the team win the last two World Series. It appears that Walter’s empire started to crumble when the DOJ began breathing down his neck for loan fraud related to the Lakers purchase. Now he’s also in talks to sell his shares of English football powerhouse Chelsea. Walter needs to get liquid quickly, and it’s hard to beat cashing out an investment that makes you $2.5 billion in under a year. That’s what he originally bought the Dodgers for back in 2012.

The federal investigation sure seems like it played a role in Walter’s sale to Kushner and Iger. It isn’t lost on anyone that Donald Trump’s DOJ is investigating Walter to the point that he had to sell the Lakers to brother of his son-in-law (Jared Kushner is heavily involved in the White House’s Middle East diplomacy). The idea that the Lakers and Dodgers would both be able to out-spend their rivals quietly started to crash and burn when the feds began poking around Walter’s empire, even if no one realized it at the time. It’s left the franchise in an extremely vulnerable position with Kushner’s private equity firm now controlling the team with no experience in owning sports franchises.

The timing of all this is fascinating from an on-court perspective. The Lakers essentially mortgaged their future this summer to build around Luka Doncic with two years remaining on his contract. Los Angeles knew it needed a strong defensively center, so it traded two future first-round picks and two swaps for Walker Kessler. The Lakers then handed out four-year contracts to Sandro Mamukelashvili and Quentin Grimes while giving Collin Sexton two years, while most other NBA free agents were only getting one year deals.

The Lakers are all-in. They can’t trade a future first-round pick for the next seven years. Lead executive Rob Pelinka improved this team in some potentially meaningful ways, but they still lost LeBron James in free agency, still play in the loaded Western Conference, and still need to find answers in the forward room before anyone is ready to deem them a true championship contender.

It would make sense if the new ownership group wanted to replace Pelinka with one of their own guys, but does that really make sense when a new front office would immediately be strapped for future assets that Pelinka traded away? The Lakers were already going to be facing a ton of pressure on the court this season, and that only multiplies with new owners coming in.

Lakers fans are understandably uneasy about all of this, but you can argue the franchise is in a better place today than it was a month ago. The weird split power dynamic between Walter and Jeanie Buss is gone, the familiar cronies that lined the family business under Jeanie have no stake in the game anymore, and the new owners are apparently flush with cash. While it’s totally understandable to have some discomfort with a Kushner as the lead owner, it doesn’t sound like his group made this deal to strip the team for parts.

New Lakers owner Josh Kushner sent a letter to investors in his firm, Thrive Capital, earlier this week. @nmasc_ got a copy of it. Thrive Eternal, which will financing part of the Lakers sale, invests in "assets counter positioned to transformation." Bob Iger is an advisor at… pic.twitter.com/CRqtDXOAS3

— Mike Vorkunov (@MikeVorkunov) August 14, 2026

I don’t think this is a Tom Dundon situation. Kushner and Iger wanted a premium brand. Iger saved Disney twice. Jerry Buss turned the Lakers into a premium brand, and his kids have essentially presided over its downfall since he died. The Showtime era Lakers died with Dr. Buss. The fact that the team can still attract mega-watt superstar power and win a championship after his passing is a testament to the brand having lasting appeal even after the kids tried to run it into the ground.

The short-term future of the Lakers will be decided more by if Matisse Thybulle and Ziaire Williams can shore up the wing defense than the sale. This season hangs in the balance with Doncic’s health, Austin Reaves’ potential ascension to All-Star status, and Kessler’s ability to be worth everything they traded for him. If the swing factors swing in the Lakers’ favor, I would expect Kushner and Iger to be happy to write Doncic a huge check for an extension, and to keep this team intact up to the same point where most every other NBA owner is willing to go right now — which stops at the second apron.

It’s for the best that the Lakers family ownership dynamic is finished. The NBA has simply outgrown that model, and the Buss kids were never going to stop fighting. Walter’s sale is a curveball, but the Lakers should have more stability with Kushner and Iger than they would have had with Walter under federal investigation. The leadership should be more professional than it ever was with the Buss kids in charge.

It remains to be seen how Kushner will run the team, and the first real question starts with Pelinka’s job as lead executive. Walter’s Dodgers spared no expense in making sure the entire organization was acquiring top of the market talent in every department, and not just on the field. Will Kushner be willing to eventually replace Pelinka with the best candidate available? Will Doncic be signed to a long-term extension by then?

I wouldn’t say the Lakers are in big trouble yet, but the stakes of this season just got even higher.

We’ve reached the doldrums of the NBA calendar. The only excitement currently is the investigation into the Kawhi Leonard-Clippers possible cap circumvention and whatever the hell is going on with the sale of the Los Angeles Lakers.

But now that the schedule is out and you’ve had time to process and digest things, how are you feeling about the Sixers? What’s on your mind as we sit here in mid-August?

Hit me with your thoughts and questions below and I’ll do my best to respond to as many as possible!