According to the report<\/a> from Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, Clippers president of business operations Gillian Zucker initiated deals for Leonard with Boingo Wireless, Daktronics and Lipton Insurance in the summer of 2020, worth $18M in total. None of those deals was publicly announced.<\/p>\nWhat makes the deals even shadier is that each of those companies signed multi-million consulting agreements with the Clippers either just before or on the same day as they made their deals with Leonard. Two of those companies received $10M “consulting fees” up front \u2014 and none of the three companies normally charged for consulting services.<\/p>\n
In other words, the companies paid Leonard and were immediately compensated for doing so by the Clippers. Or it was an enormous, improbable coincidence.<\/p>\n
Clippers acceded to Kawhi Leonard’s agent’s demands<\/h2>\n
The report alleges that Dennis “Uncle Dennis” Robertson pressured the Clippers to provide illegal off-court benefits in early 2020, requests that were never reported to the NBA. Instead, Zucker made introductions to companies at a highly unusual time \u2014 June 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the NBA shut down.<\/p>\n
None of the three companies had ever given a celebrity endorser anything comparable to what they paid Leonard, who had “minimal performance obligations” with each company. All he did was make a single visit to a military base and, on one other occasion, sign memorabilia. For that, he got $18M.<\/p>\n
A Clippers executive specified that he wanted Daktronics to give Leonard a two-year endorsement deal for $6M in order to win the bid for the Intuit Dome’s scoreboard contract. Less than a year later, the Clippers informed Daktronics that they would be spending more on the scoreboard \u2014 and that Daktronics should pay Leonard $2M more for the second year as a result.<\/p>\n
With Aspiration, the Clippers agreed to pay it $7M per year for a “sustainability services” contract with the Forum, purchased by Ballmer in 2020. That’s the same amount that Aspiration was paying Leonard in cash each year, along with $5M annually in equity.<\/p>\n
The Clippers are still proclaiming their innocence<\/a>, but at some point they’ll need to provide a reasonable explanation for the mountain of evidence the NBA uncovered about their financial dealings with Leonard and their sponsors.<\/p>\nUntil then, it’s hard not to see the Clippers’ activities as calculated, widespread and brazen. If what’s in the NBA’s independent report isn’t salary-cap circumvention, it’s hard to imagine what is.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n