Pablo Torre Talks NBA's Clippers Punishment, Kawhi/Ballmer Intrigue & More I The Rich Eisen Show

Pablo Torre has been telling this story for exactly one year. He knows the number because someone at home keeps track. "I'm very aware of how long my wife has said to me, you're still talking to people about this. And the answer is, for 365 days exactly today, we are talking about this."

The NBA's ruling landed on the anniversary, which gave Torre a chance to explain what a year of outside investigation actually produced.

His read on the scope is the key to the whole thing. The league gave Wachtell Lipton a specific mandate, narrower than everything Torre has reported. "Not everything that we've reported is in the report." But inside that narrow scope, the firm "found an almost bottomless rabbit hole. And that's what took a year."

What the report describes, per Torre, is a pattern rather than an incident. He named the participants as the NBA's findings do: Steve Ballmer along with two lieutenants, president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank and president of business operations Gillian Zucker. The alleged mechanism ran through Intuit Dome partners, with Aspiration, Daktronics, Locked In Insurance and Boingo Wireless all named, as a route to get Kawhi Leonard money well beyond the salary cap. Far enough beyond, Torre said, that the league handed down what "seems to be the biggest punishment against an owner in the history of American sports."

Rich asked the question that has been sitting under all of this. Where does the Clippers' vehement response come from?

Torre called it as good a question as any he has been asked, and answered it chronologically. When his show sought comment before the first episode a year ago, the response was that the story was "probably false." Then Ballmer went on ESPN and spoke to Ramona Shelburne, and Torre noted what happened to that account. "That testimony is now in the NBA's report, by the way, because they fact-check and disprove those things as not true."

From there the posture hardened. Probably false went away, replaced by a promise to explain what really happened, in a way that would embarrass the podcaster and leave anyone who believed his sources regretful. "And so for a year we've waited for the alternate rational explanation."

It has still not arrived, and now the ground has shifted. The 35-page Wachtell Lipton report cost 50 million dollars, billed to Ballmer himself, a detail Ballmer raised in a letter to Adam Silver. And it contains material Torre never had. Contemporaneous notes taken by Lawrence Frank, which Torre flagged as very interesting. Emails that, in the report's account, show a manufactured paper trail intended to deceive the league. Torre's conclusion was blunt. "How do you explain this if it's not exactly what now the NBA and I have both said? I have no idea what else they're referring to."

Then Rich asked about the part that made everyone angry, which is what happened to Leonard. A 700,000 dollar fine. No suspension. No voiding. See you in Toronto.

Torre agreed the anger is earned on the merits, and made the case against Leonard more forcefully than most. "He was, of course, the protagonist." By Torre's reporting, Leonard and his uncle asked multiple teams for this and the Clippers were the ones who said yes. The money he laid out is specific: 48 million dollars in total contractual value promised from Aspiration, plus, per the NBA report, another 18 million from at least three other companies. "Let's just say 66 million in total value. That's the guy who skated." And that figure only runs through 2022. There is more, which he foreshadowed rather than detailed.

So why did Leonard skate? Torre's answer is that it was political, and that the mechanism is genuinely clever.

Ballmer, after the ruling, threatened arbitration rather than a lawsuit. What the league understood, and Torre does not believe Ballmer did, is that under the collective bargaining agreement arbitration is a process that has to be initiated by the player and his union. So when Leonard publicly took the medicine, essentially conceding his inner circle got out of control and saying he wants to move on, what he was actually doing was settling. And the union settled with him.

That closes the arbitration door. "Steve Ballmer can only go to the actual court system and sue everybody." Adam Silver, the league, reporters, whoever he chooses.

Rich worked through the implication out loud, and Torre confirmed it. The relative slap on the wrist for Leonard bought the NBA something. In Torre's framing, the league's incentive throughout was to make this end. "Can we get this podcast to stop having episodes about this? Can we get people to stop asking about a deeply embarrassing thing for the whole sport? A cardinal rule was broken. Will there be accountability? How do we get past this?"

Ballmer has spent two weeks signaling he does not want to settle. So rather than take the easy route, Torre said, the league took a cleverer one and boxed him out of arbitration, leaving him one option that comes attached to discovery, real court, more documents, more questions and a much longer timeline.

Which brought Rich to his own standing opinion, that this is the worst acquisition in the history of sports anywhere on Earth. Torre allowed for scientific humility. "We continue to investigate on that front."

The bill Rich read out is hard to argue with. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Jaylen Williams. Ten first-round picks. Two first-round pick swaps. And now, on top of it, a settlement by the player that leaves the owner in a worse position to fight.

Torre added the detail he considers the most poetic. Ballmer is banned for a year from the building he personally funded, the most expensive building in the history of American sports, which is also the nexus of the deals in question. "There is insult, there is injury."

Then he reached for Christopher Nolan. Torre compared it to the scene where Bane tells his accomplice, "They expect one of us in the wreckage, brother." One man parachutes out to Canada. The other is left holding every bag. "That is also the story of the Kawhi Leonard trade."

Asked where it goes now, Torre made clear he does not think it is close to over, and listed what he is still chasing.

Dennis Wong, the limited partner who owns one percent to Ballmer's 99, appears in the Aspiration money flow as clearly as anyone and is not mentioned in the report at all. Rhode Island Football Club is its own rabbit hole, and it connects to the extension Leonard signed in January 2024, which Torre pointed out was below the max. Given what is now established about the years through 2022, his question is the obvious one. Why would he take a discount?

Beyond his own reporting, the institutional machinery is still running. Wachtell Lipton says in the report that it has received new tips in recent weeks. In civil court in Los Angeles, 11 Aspiration investors have sued Ballmer for fraud, on the theory that they would not have invested in the tree-planting startup had they known it was cap circumvention. And on an earnings call, Daktronics disclosed it has received requests for information from the SEC.

Torre made a point of clarifying which SEC. "That is not the Southeastern Conference. That is the Securities and Exchange Commission." His summary followed. "I can only get so much information. The NBA can only get so much information. Now the federal government is actively probing this."

He closed on a lighter note about Mark Cuban, who had responded to him online and apologized. Torre would rather have the conversation than the apology, and made a pitch in the appropriate format. "Mark, I have an offer for you. I will offer you a percentage of my show in exchange for an unlimited episode that we could do together."