Buckle Up: Pablo Torre Has Dropped Some New Shocking Evidence As A Potential "Smoking Gun" In The Kawhi Leonard Scandal
If you can't tell by now, I may or may not be slightly addicted to the Kawhi Leonard/Clippers Scandal. I can't get enough of it. With every passing day, as more and more details start to come to light, this is a live look at yours truly
Ever since Pablo Torre first broke the story, it's basically been him against the world. Given what's being suggested, and what a massive issue it would be for the league as a whole, if you're a basketball fan I don't know how you couldn't be all in on this scandal. It has everything you could want really. A superstar player, an NBA owner who is richer than God and determined to make his franchise a contender no matter what it takes, shady backroom dealings (allegedly), denials, investiagtions, it has it all.
Yesterday, Adam Silver spoke to the media about the investiagtion and basically said there needs to be a smoking gun in order for the NBA to do anything about it. Hearing the way he talked about the scandal and what would need to be required to levy punishment was fishy as hell
because it felt like the NBA was already laying the groundwork for a cover up. We'll see if that's what happens, but that's at least how I took Silver's presser yesterday.
Here's the thing about Pablo Torre that I'm not sure Steve Ballmer or the NBA has fully accepted yet. This man has taken his time and he is coming prepared. This isn't a case of a reporter throwing some bullshit out there in an effort to go viral and get clicks. The man did real reporting. He put on a sports journalism masterclass, and it does not stop with his initial reporting.
The NBA says they need a smoking gun? OK, that doesn't seem to be a problem for Pablo Torre
Uhhhhh oh. The NBA, Ballmer and some people in the sports world tried to call Pablo Torre's bluff and spin all this as a nothing-to-see-here situation, so what does he do? He responds with even more evidence. More documents, more wire transfers, more instances of fellow Clippers co-owners being involved.
Just think of everything we know up until this point. There was the reporting that Kawhi's camp essentially asked for this same setup from the Raptors in 2019, which they did not do. Trading for Paul George, a no-show sponsorship deal etc. It's surely just a coincidence the Clippers did both of those things! There was the initial reporting talking about the Ballmer investments into this fugazi company. There was the reporting about additional stock that was part of the agreement that matched the Ballmer investment total. Now we have this additional information of another co-owner putting in money that directly matched what Kawhi was paid?
I'm not a big math guy, let's not fortget that I did go to ASU for a reason. But by my calculations, it has to be a 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance that all these things are just a coincidence and don't actually point to some shady maneuvering by the Clippers to pay Kawhi outside of the salary cap. Sorry, there's just no way.
And you know what? I'd bet anything Pablo Torre has even more. If this new reporting is once again questioned, it wouldn't shock me at all if Pablo dropped yet another hammer. This is a 7-month investigation! You don't bring something like this to light unless you have rock solid evidence, which Pablo Torre clearly has. I'm not even sure what type of spinzone would even justify everything he's reported thus far? From the outside looking in, it sure does feel like the Clippers were caught doing something shady that is very much against the rules. It compromises the integrity of the entire NBA if teams don't all have to follow the same roster building constraints, and you have a team with an owner who has more money than every other owner combined, shelling out 10s of millions of dollars to a star player so he joins their team. That's a big time problem.
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So if the NBA says they needed to find the smoking gun and that the burden of proof is on the league to provide, it looks like that's exactly what we might now have. Buckle up.