The NBA slapped the Clippers with unprecedented penalties for salary-cap circumvention, costing the team draft picks, a $30 million fine, and lengthy suspensions for top executives and the owner, while Kawhi Leonard was fined and moved to Toronto amid the fallout.

The league’s ruling is severe and will shape the Clippers’ roster and front-office plans for years. First-round draft picks were forfeited across several drafts, and the franchise must absorb a $30 million penalty while key executives face multi-month suspensions. Those moves leave the Clippers publicly weakened and privately scrambling to respond to a report that took more than a year to complete.

The investigation centers on endorsement deals and how off-court payments may have been used to exceed allowable compensation under the collective bargaining agreement. Kawhi Leonard, who has since been traded to the Toronto Raptors, was fined $700,000 for his role and says he was unaware of the Clippers’ front-office arrangements. The team has denied the findings and Owner Steve Ballmer is reportedly furious about the punishments, which include his own one-year suspension.

ESPN’s Brian Windhorst described the report as lacking a single “smoking gun” but argued the weight of the evidence is damning and would likely convince a jury. Some of the conclusions are framed as clear violations of the cap rules, and multiple executives received league suspensions of varying length. Kawhi’s uncle and business adviser, Dennis Robertson, has been barred from doing business with any NBA team for five years.

The probe traces back to a $28 million no-show promotion contract between Leonard and Aspiration, a green energy fintech that later folded. That contract, plus a series of endorsement deals and corporate arrangements, forms the core of the league’s circumvention theory. Aspiration’s bankruptcy filings even list Leonard among the company’s creditors, and the financial ties raised red flags that expanded the investigation.

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Along the way, other payments and equity transfers factored into the NBA’s case. Investigators detailed multimillion-dollar deals and consulting arrangements tied to companies that subsequently did business with the Clippers. The report also points to efforts by team staff to facilitate introductions and deals that, investigators say, were unusually large and poorly supported by public promotional activity.

The announcement marks the end of a lengthy investigation. What began as an inquiry into whether the Clippers circumvented the NBA’s salary-cap rules through Leonard’s endorsement deal with Aspiration expanded over time.

The investigation stemmed from a Sept. 3, 2025 “Pablo Torre Finds Out” podcast episode reporting that Leonard accepted a $28 million no-show contract with Aspiration, the California environmental company that also served as the team’s jersey-patch partner until the end of the 2022-23 season.

The NBA examined whether that contract was an attempt by the Clippers to pay him beyond the salary he earned from the team and more than he could make under the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement — a method of salary cap circumvention in violation of the league’s rules.

Aspiration had gone into bankruptcy in March 2025, listing Leonard among its leading creditors alongside the Clippers. According to legal documents filed in court by Aspiration, Leonard was owed $7 million through his limited liability company KL2 Aspire, LLC.

The NBA hired Wachtell to investigate the allegation days after the podcast first aired. The firm has run several significant investigations for the league, and the Clippers became the latest, and perhaps its most high-profile, since Wachtell looked into former Clippers owner Donald Sterling in 2014.

The report lays out a chain of introductions, payments, and contracts that investigators say created the appearance of artificially boosting off-court income for Leonard. Several corporate partners signed deals at a time when sponsorship activity was generally down, and the endorsement agreements often required minimal activation from Leonard. Investigators flagged consulting contracts and large transfers of money to entities connected to the player as part of the scheme.

• Shortly after Leonard signed with the Clippers in July 2019, Robertson told Ballmer and top team officials that he expected about $10 million in off-court income for Leonard and pressured them during the ensuing year to make good on it. In April 2020, Robertson asked for a 3-6 month timeline, and Clippers officials assured him they would live up to that demand, according to notes written by Frank at the time.
• In June 2020, Zucker introduced Robertson by email to executives at Daktronics, Boingo and Lockton Companies. Within a month of those introductions, Leonard signed multimillion-dollar deals with two of the companies on the same day. The next month, he signed another, the NBA’s report said, and was paid $18 million by the companies within a year. Zucker, investigators said, leveraged personal relationships at two of the companies; her husband was the chair of the board of directors at one.
• The deals with Daktronics, Boingo and Lockton Companies stood out because they were signed at a time when sponsorship agreements had slowed across the industry in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and were signed by companies that had never agreed to a deal of that magnitude — and have not since. The endorsement deals also asked little of Leonard and were not publicly announced. The only time Leonard did an endorsement activation for any of the three companies, NBA investigators found, was a visit to a military base and signing some memorabilia.
• Boingo, Daktronics and Lockton each signed consulting deals with the Clippers soon after Zucker emailed them about Leonard. Two of them received $10 million payments before signing Leonard, and the other received $2 million after its first payment to him.
• In addition to an endorsement deal with Aspiration, Leonard also received $20 million in equity from Joe Sanberg, the company’s co-founder, who pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges last fall.
• The deal between the company and Leonard was facilitated and managed by Zucker. She connected Aspiration and Leonard’s representatives, helped with negotiations and was told by Sanberg that the company would not sign the deal unless the Clippers also brought business back to Aspiration.
• Aspiration ultimately signed a contract to offer sustainability services for The Forum, another venue owned by Ballmer. The deal did not specify any sustainability terms but said the Clippers would spend $7 million to match what Aspiration paid Leonard annually.
• When Sanberg threatened to blow up the endorsement deal with Leonard unless the contract for the Forum was signed, he emailed Clippers executives to make it clear that the two contracts were linked. Ultimately, Ballmer signed off on the Forum deal, and the explicit relationship between the two contracts was a violation of the NBA’s cap circumvention rules.

Leonard is free to play with his new team while the Clippers face the penalties and fallout from the investigation. The unusual combination of a low-profile star, a fragile green-energy partner, and a series of large corporate payments created the conditions for a major league investigation and a costly ruling. The Clippers will now spend years navigating the competitive and reputational damage while the league points to its enforcement of salary-cap integrity.