NBA Drops The HAMMER On The Clippers | TMZ Sports

What's going on? Thank you so much. I feel like a million dollars. Shout out to TMZ. Let me check out that rig. TMZ stands for? The Mayweather Zone. How'd you find me, bro? I got my disguise on. I love my TMZ family. Welcome to TMZ Sports. The NBA has dropped the hammer on the Los Angeles Clippers and their owner, Steve Ballmer, while taking it very easy on NBA superstar Kawhi Leonard. I'm Babcock here with Erica, who you haven't seen before, but is our Clippers superfan, Dylan and Luca. This, guys, has been the news that I think the basketball world has been waiting for for months. You've probably heard the allegations here. The allegation was that the Los Angeles Clippers, when they acquired Kawhi Leonard years ago, that instead of paying him all of their money and it going under the NBA salary cap, and you can obviously only spend a certain amount of money, that they basically gave him a no-show endorsement deal where he wouldn't actually have to do anything for this company, but he would get the money. Now, we heard a bunch of denials over the months as the NBA was investigating. But at the end of the day here now, the NBA found that, yeah, this actually did happen. Kawhi Leonard, is he accepting responsibility or not? We'll get to that in just a second. Let's talk punishment, though. The Clippers, they have been docked five first-round draft picks starting in 2029, going through 2033. A massive, massive penalty there. Ballmer, the owner, suspended for the entire season. No team activities, no nothing, can have nothing to do with his basketball team. Fine, $30 million. If you didn't think you had to sit at home, and that was enough, $30 million fine. There were other executives with the Clippers that have been suspended, but those are sort of the top-line items there. Now you say, OK, they went easy on Kawhi. And you guys tell me here if you think I'm wrong about this. Kawhi Leonard is going to be fined $700,000. Now that's a lot of money by 99.9% of this country, but not for Kawhi Leonard. He's set to make something like $50 million next year. It's like a game-and-a-quarter suspension, basically. Not getting paid for a game-and-a-quarter. That's it for Kawhi Leonard. I mean, I feel like this is just a pretty blatant case of them wanting to keep their stars playing. Because otherwise, I think you could very easily justify them. Kawhi actually came out with an apology, saying pretty much that I accept responsibility for other people doing me wrong. So he said, integrity and respect for this game are fundamental to who I am. I accept full responsibility for laughs and judgment by people within my inner circle. And regret the distraction this situation has caused the fans and my family. I entered into my contract with the Clippers as well as in agreements and questions in good faith. Fully committed to fulfilling my obligations and with no knowledge of any intent on anyone's part to circumvent the salary cap. If so facto, everybody else did something wrong. I didn't do anything. I'm sorry for doing that. I didn't know. They knew. I'm sorry they screwed up. Exactly. And I mean, I think like, you know, the sport is better when you have your best players playing. Kawhi Leonard is one of the best in the game. One of the best to ever do it. This is kind of like the most thin veneer of an apology you can get from him, right? Yeah. No, this is insane too. And I mean, like the Steve Ballmer away from the team. He's like one of the most recognizable owners in the league. Mostly for his action. He's always sitting courtside. He's always going nuts. And I mean, like they've tried, this Clippers team has tried to make big moves in the last couple of years. You know, Kawhi Leonard coming to the Clippers was a big deal. And, you know, Paul George a couple of years ago. But it's all just been so, so rough. I mean, they just opened this stadium, was it year one or two of this arena? Two. Yeah. This is, that's, I don't know, this really, really stinks for Ballmer. I wonder if he's mad too that Kawhi's leaving him and barely getting a slap on the wrist. And honestly, too, a big loss for the fans because as a faithful Clipper Nation fans, we put all of our eggs in the Kawhi basket. We celebrated when he came to the team. This was our year. He took Paul George, two of the top leading men in the NBA. They were supposed to come and change the culture with the new stadium. And that was supposed to happen. That didn't happen. We pivoted. We got Russell Westbrook. We got all these other key makers around Kawhi to make something happen. And it still didn't happen. So now that he's leaving and we left with nothing and he's taking, we gave away picks for him. And now they took away five picks from us, 10 picks down the drain. No ring, nothing for Kawhi, nothing to show for it. It's not even like, Erica, you look to the future like, OK, you know, this is happening. That's good. That's good. I mean, it's bleak now in Clipper Nation. Yeah, no, bleak is the word. It's so sad. It's a dark day. We have nothing to show for it. All of these picks, all of these players have come and gone. And now we have no owner. We have no president. The vibe in Etiudan is going to be a dark place. Yeah, I think if you would have went back to when Kawhi signed and like you said, you know, with PG, you would have thought that maybe they don't only win one championship. Maybe they win multiple championships. And now to be in this spot, no championships, no Kawhi because like we've said, Kawhi is headed to Toronto. That's happened. The only thing that was holding that up was the NBA's investigation and those findings being announced. Now that'll clear the way for him to go to Canada. By the way, unsurprisingly, the Clippers are really pissed. They actually released a statement. We vehemently reject the NBA's findings, which are the result of a heavily biased investigation seeking to justify a predetermined narrative rather than facts and evidence. What the league told us privately differs from what it announced today publicly. They continued, we intend to vigorously challenge these findings and penalties.