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So less punishment than the Wolves but 10x the rule-breaking?

That's a nice precedent to set.

 

How is it??? The Wolves had the contract written out how they were going to Circumvent detail from the Agent. They got caught but had how they were going to do it. That’s why they’re worse.

This has fraud but players making side deals. Clippers fined and penalized for previous sanctions and For number 1 not notifying the league of this unique contract. You can get all those penalty’s and fined for not notifying the league.

 

I’m not sure what you mean 10x the rule breaking? Do you mean dollar figures? Because inflation has run rampant since 2000, the max contract back then was 14m and Joe Smith signed for around the MLE. It would be like a team signing a max player for the MLE today and then giving him a max 4 year contract when they have his bird rights to make up for the lost money.

That’s far worse than paying Kawhi Leonard who was already on a max contract more money. Because it gave the wolves a better team and an unfair advantage in their team building.

So no, I don’t think they should lose too many draft picks. If they signed Kawhi for 15m and then were able to bring back PG, Harden, Zubac and sign someone else like Aaron Gordon or Mikael Bridges, then yeah that would be a problem.

 

The scam was more deliberate.

At least Joe Smith would have been paid under the cap after his bird right's were secured. It's also not uncommon for a team to structure a deal that helps both sides. It's not like they stole money from the NBA. The only dumb part is they had it in writing to try and get legal recourse but it backfired on them. These handshake deals happen all the time where I think today, management and agents have a better relationship with these type of deals.

Kawhi getting paid off the books to circumvent the cap is more criminal and the fact that technically, they'll owe money on luxury tax upwards of what? $70 million?

How is a fine (Ballmer/Clippers don't give a s*** about it), ONE DRAFT PICK, and Dennis getting removed going to fix this situation? That's peanuts.

 

^^This

 

Good way you put it.

 

they also had the full mle to sign djj during the time which this stuff was happening--which if kawhi was paid 7 million more than the max (as he was), they couldn't have done. so they did gain a competitive advantage. before you scoff--imagine we got to add djj to our team right now. we'd be much more serious contenders.

 

Can you imagine, with the outlay of money needed from the Lakers to sign the Snake, if we had been successful, and were THAT locked into him and his contract ...... with just how quickly he and his act would have been on LeBron's and AD's too I would think ..... s*** list? Talk about a dodged 155mm howitzer shell .... YOWZA!!

 

we'd also be in the process of losing eleventy zillion draft picks right now. except there would be no protracted investigation for basketball reasons.

 

• • Klutch & LeBron vs Snake and his Uncle. Yikes what a nightmare. Media would have it bigger than Shaq v Kobe but with nothing good coming out of it.

 

We have a cap in play with max contracts. So Kawhi couldn’t of been paid more than the max… I get that he got the endorsement money for not doing anything, but for his NBA play, there wasn’t a way to pay him more and as a result there isn’t any luxury tax owed.

I’m not sure how the NBA is going to close this loophole, because it opens up a huge problem with the cap.

But, regardless of how they tackle it, I’m not sure if you can see why getting an unfair advantage in building your team is a worse offense than Kawhi getting endorsement money. One allows a team to build an unfair advantage from having more players, the other just let a greedy guy manipulate an owner into giving him more money than the max.

 

not sure how many times i have to say that artificially increasing the max IS artificially increasing the cap. the max is tied to the cap. if kawhi got a bs endorsement, that's more salary, hence a bigger max. as such, it did grant them a team-building advantage. the idea that cap circumvention can't apply to a max deal sort of negates the entire rule system.

we're seeing the second apron tear teams down. the clippers had 7 million extra dollars to work with. we could have used just 1m extra a couple times in the past couple years.

as far as how the nba handles it, i think it's not unreasonable to monitor endorsement deals. sorry, you guys make hundreds of millions of dollars, you're subject to a little more scrutiny than i am. price of doing business. i had the IRS come after like $128 from me when i was living near the poverty line. if someone randomly gives a pro basketball player a generational wealth payout for absolutely nothing, it's ok that a flag goes up.

 

It’s going to be removal of 1-2 picks and a paltry fine.
It should be:
Ballmer banned from any NBA game for the next two seasons
Kawhi banned from this upcoming season with no pay and forced to remain a Clipper for the rest of his career
5 first rounders taken away over the next 10 seasons

 

It’s gotta be physiologically mind f***ing to have that linging over your head half of the season if your star player is going to get suspended if your going to get suspended with the all star game lingering around after that.

it’s definitely going to be a factor on that team and a distraction.

 

Not a single person here cares about Kawhi Leonard getting an endorsement deal.

Good for him. He did his thing and got more money like he should be trying to do. He's not going to be facing any legal charges so that's money he technically can keep unless the NBA decides to go after his salary via suspension.

We're saying that the endorsement deal was disguised as an "endorsement" to circumvent the salary cap.

E.g., Kawhi wanted more money, Clippers couldn't offer him more than the max, so they found a way to get him an "endorsement" deal to get paid OVER the max.

Joe Smith is peanuts compared to this. The team just wanted him to wait another year for the bird rights to kick in. Harmless, actually, but I can see why the league felt they had to crack down on it. IMO, it's because the league didn't want to get involved with a he-said, she-said type of situation where a team doesn't honor the deal and the players association starts fighting back, etc., Just too much of a mess for the NBA to deal with.

This Kawhi situation is literally them knowing they can't get Kawhi unless they break the rules, which they did, and then continuously lied about it.

 

I sure wonder what Clipper forum fans are saying about this!!?
I think this just puts a dagger into the Clippers LA coffin. It is going to make being a fan of this team, that much more difficult. Ballmer and Kawhi really F'ed this up.

 

Paying a max player more money, doesn't help them field a better team. Maybe your argument is that Kawhi could have packed up and left elsewhere? Potentially... but the clippers could also pay him the most of anyone. So, how did it give them a team building advantage? It didn't give them 7million more to go out and get more players. They just gave Kawhi the max, and then gave him more so he stayed happy rehabbing his degenerative knees.

Maybe for you and maybe for me this is fine. I doubt the player's association will agree. They already feel they aren't being valued enough for what they bring to the table. So I think they block any scrutiny into endorsement deals and if we don't like it - bad luck.

However, I do think having some kind of NBA endorsement approval system would help. There's 450 active players in the NBA at any one time. Surely they could employ 2-5 lawyers that just go through the documents and spot some of these things. For example, a system that flags sponsors for both the team and player. But even then, it won't really eradicate people trying to find edges or create value. Take the VC connections that Golden State employed to convince KD and Iguodola to join - sure that wasn't a major point, but it sure helps having someone that can triple your investment over 5 years as a friend of the teams. I'm not sure how you police those advantages.

 

But, if they actually had to report that money, wouldn't they have to pay a huge tax on it, to the other teams? And doesn't that provide an advantage? I am not going on the premise that this was that close to being a legitimate endorsement, I am thinking it was really a circumvention of the cap and actually just a way to increase the amount you paid Kawhi and if you did that, then you gotta pay the tax, which is huge. So maybe that should be some of that fine. Make Ballmer pay that projected tax bill, then all the other fines, loss of draft picks, etc.

 

And look at Kevin Durants Portfolio after that. If we really want to go down that route. Hes one of the biggest VCs in the valley. Have to have had help with that.

 

But on the next contract he signed he did take less than Max which enabled them last year to have more cap space for Harden, etc. It wasn’t a long gap in the time frame and “could have been” pre-emptive if that does come out from some of these anonymous statements from ex Clippers employees like we’re seeing reported. So either after the fact of original signing for more than and not reported for repeater tax over 2nd apron purposes or for freeing up more cap money to sign others by taking less in his most recent contract are “possibilities” for the why he was given the 28m deal to do nothing and was supposed to get 20m more in stock on the IPO.