Steve Ballmer has finally broken his silence on the allegations of salary cap circumvention in a sit down with ESPN's Ramona Shelburne.
I'll do you a solid and save 16 minutes of your time by summing it up like this:
Poor billionaire Steve was bamboozled by some bad, bad men.
I hope the sarcasm in my summation was prolific. It was a 16 minute finger pointing sermon, in which he claimed to have zero intel on Kawhi's deal with Aspiration, and that they were all got by fraudsters.
If you watch any part of the video, just skip to 8 minutes and 50 seconds. "I got conned! Me! They conned me!"
This is similar to an 8 year old that just got caught by their parents doing something they shouldn't have. Play dumb as long as possible. Deny, deny, deny.
The first response the Clippers gave to Pablo stated that these allegations of cap circumvention were "provably false". In a second statement put out by the team later that day, the phrase "provably false" was nowhere to be found.
Cleary, their new course of action is just spamming plausible deniability.
"We didn't know, we promise!".
It's also worth noting that this isn't Ballmer's first time visiting the Oblivion gates of cap circumvention.
Alongside the circumstantial evidence you see a potential pattern of behavior in trying to find a way to work around the leagues CBA.
The league still has to thoroughly investigate the situation, and we can't say definitively as of yet if there has been any misconduct. However, in the court of public opinion, the optics don't look good.
The main person I've seen stick up for Ballmer is Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban actively opposed Pablo Torre's investigation and said "I'm team Ballmer". Lucky for us, he joined Pablo's podcast to discuss his disagreements and reasons for siding with Steve Ballmer.
Cuban pointed out that Kawhi's Uncle Dennis could've orchestrated the whole ordeal, with the clippers being none the wiser. That seems plausible, giving Dennis Robertson history of representing Kawhi and the rumors of him asking for sweeteners during Kawhi's free agency in the past (no wrongdoing was found when the League investigated this in 2019). Maybe he worked out a lil side deal with Aspiration after the two parties were introduced.
It also feels incredibly implausible that Ballmer (owner of the team and Aspiration investor) wouldn't know anything at all about a deal between a presenting sponsor of the team and the teams best player. Maybe they're not allowed to know specifics for legal reasons. Seeing as I'm probably the farthest thing from a lawyer, you'll have to ask someone else.
He also stated multiple times that Ballmer couldn't have been this dumb. The notion that just because you're a billionaire you are simply exonerated from doing dumb shit is hilarious.
Here's the issue: Ballmer's Clips have done this before. Ballmer tried to give Deandre Jordan a sweetener (albeit it was a Lexus sponsorship deal worth $200,00 per year) in 2015 to lure him away from signing with the Mavericks. LAC was fined $250,000 as a result for their transgressions. Who was the majority owner of the Mavs at the time? Mark Cuban. Cuban now sticking up for Ballmer is a lethal dose of irony. Billionaires unite!
Ingesting this story from all angles has taken up more of my bandwidth than I probably want to admit. It's the one of the most fascinating off-the-court stories we've seen in quite sometime. The fallout could be massive if the league finds hard evidence of misconduct.
-WhataMark