When I was young, and the world was as innocent as a newborn baby's bottom, sports were ridiculously simple. Players played because they loved the game, fans were fans because they loved the game, and rich owners like Phil Wrigley (Cubs), Jack Mara (NY Giants), and Jack Kent Cooke (Lakers) owned sports teams because they loved the game.
Before free agency, before players' off-field antics became front-page news, before multi-billion-dollar TV contracts and insufferable agents, there was the game. "The human drama of athletic competition," as ABC's Wide World of Sports used to say in its open.
The "game" is still there, and what happens on the field, the ice, or the court is still recognizable as "sport." But the ballyhoo surrounding the "game" has become intolerably idiotic. And that includes scandals.
Gambling scandals, player scandals, PEDs and other drug scandals, sign-stealing and competitive cheating scandals, sexual abuse scandals — the list goes on. I don't read the sports section of any newspaper, just news about the teams that I follow. It's impossible to get away from it all.
Now, a new scandal has been uncovered. The Wall Street Journal reports that the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers franchise has received the most severe punishment in league history. The team will not have a first-round draft pick for the next five years, the organization was fined $30 million, and team owner and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was suspended from all league activities for one year.
What horrific crime did Ballmer and the Clippers commit? What rule did they thumb their noses at? What could the Clippers (an afterthought in the Los Angeles sports firmament) have done to deserve such a drastic punishment?
The team spent too much money on a player.
The Clippers played games and fiddled with the holy and sacred "salary cap," and the Guardians of NBA Purity smote them to the ground and hurled thunderbolts at them. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver was beside himself (as much as the bespectacled, mild-mannered Silver could be).
“I am deeply disappointed by the flagrant violations of our rules and by the Clippers’ institutional and leadership failures that led to this misconduct,” Silver said. “The severity of the penalties reflects the seriousness of the violations.”
What would precipitate such a drastic action? It's all about the NBA salary cap. By putting financial and roster-building limits on how much franchises can spend, it prevents wealthy, big-market teams from simply buying up all the elite talent.
Pro basketball is different from pro football or baseball because one or two superstar players can turn a team of bums into a potential championship team. The league limits how much money a single player can earn (25% to 35% of the cap, depending on experience). This incentivizes elite players to spread out across different teams rather than cluster together, as one team rarely has the space to pay three top-tier superstars max contracts simultaneously.
There are arcane formulas to determine the cap size, but the bottom line is that exceeding the cap by circumventing the salary limitations is a no-no and is seen as an attack on the entire system.
The Clippers owner got just a little too cute in getting around the league's cap rules. He funneled payments to superstar Kawhi Leonard by getting several team sponsors to pitch in, calling the payments to Leonard "endorsements."
Aspiration’s records showed that the company had paid Leonard tens of millions of dollars in endorsements, despite Leonard performing no significant work for the company. The investigation named three other companies connected to the Clippers paying Leonard improperly: Boingo Wireless, Daktronics, and Lockton Insurance.
In addition to the Clippers’ penalties, Leonard, who had been included in a stalled trade to the Toronto Raptors this offseason, must pay the NBA $700,000.
“I accept full responsibility for lapses in judgment by people within my inner circle and regret the distraction this situation has caused the fans and my family,” Leonard said.
Orwell would have loved that statement by Leonard.
"The NBA’s punishment of the Clippers also includes suspensions of the organization’s presidents of business operations and basketball operations," says the Journal. But it's Ballmer who apparently masterminded the arrangements.
Ballmer was cited “for approving a business deal that he knew was a precondition for Aspiration to enter into an endorsement agreement with Mr. Leonard, and for his failure to create conditions under which his organization abided by the NBA’s circumvention rules," according to the Journal.
Leonard is still a good player, but the Clippers are not a very good team. They will probably finish below .500 this year and have little chance of making the playoffs. Expect a sell-off of their veteran players midseason, making their next few years a nightmare for fans and players.
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