Biggest Winners and Losers from NBA's Ruling on LA Clippers, Kawhi Leonard

On September 3, 2025, Pablo Torre released his first podcast episode on Kawhi Leonard's no-show deal with the disgraced "green banking" company Aspiration.

One day before the anniversary of that episode, the NBA has dropped the proverbial hammer on the team it says helped facilitate deals that ultimately amounted to cap circumvention.

ESPN's Shams Charania summarized the punishments on X.

Now, it's time to sort through the fines, pick forfeitures and suspensions and assign the biggest names involved to either side of the "winners and losers" ledger.

Loser: Steve Ballmer

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There are some pretty obvious breaking news items that make it easy to list Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer among today's losers.

The $30 million fine, practically speaking, won't hurt his pocketbook too much. It's less than half of one percent of his net worth, but there's certainly some reputational damage there.

For Ballmer, the one-year suspension is likely more painful. Few owners across sports are as passionate about their teams. Not being able to cheer his Clippers on in person is a real punishment.

But the biggest factor in Ballmer being here stems all the way back to last year, when shortly after Torre's first investigative report surfaced, he so aggressively denied any wrongdoing.

There can be some value in quickly reacting to a story like this and confidently refuting it, but you'd better have some foundation or evidence underneath that confidence. Without that, definitive statements can come back to haunt you.

Clearly, Ballmer wasn't speaking on the kind of steady ground he thought he had. And that very seriously calls his credibility into question.

Winner: Kawhi Leonard

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Kawhi was the player at the center of this whole controversy. He received 10s of millions in impermissible benefits. And in the end, his contract wasn't voided, he wasn't suspended and he only had to pay $700,000 in restitution.

For a player with over $400 million in legal, on-the-court earnings, who also received $28 million from Aspiration (plus $20 million in stock options), and who gets to leave this mess behind and join the Toronto Raptors, that amounts to less than a slap on the wrist.

With five first-round picks surrendered and key front office personnel suspended, L.A. has truly been crippled by the Kawhi era. He simply gets to play next season with a new team (assuming his trade there is finally finalized), as though nothing happened.

There's at least a chance that he was sort of a patsy in all this. The punishments for the Clippers and the five-year ban for his uncle, Dennis Robertson, suggest that may be the case. But Kawhi had to know something was amiss when this company was paying as much as it did to literally do nothing. The NBA must not have had the foundation it needed to prove that.

Loser: LA Clippers Fans

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Seven years ago, Clippers fans were exuberant over an offseason that saw them add reigning Finals MVP Kawhi and Paul George. Both superstars were in their primes, and it looked like they'd help L.A. compete for titles for years to come.

Now, in 2026, both are gone. The team only won three playoff series in the years since landing its star duo. And now, it has to forfeit at least one first-round pick in each of the 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032 and 2033 drafts.

Those assets being gone not only impact the team's long-term prospects but also make it harder to pull off win-now trades.

Assuming these punishments are upheld in Court (where the Clippers have vowed to take this matter), L.A. fans could be headed into an era packed with losing and with little more than memories of underachievement left to them by Kawhi.

Winner (for now): Adam Silver

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In the wake of Wednesday's news, the Clippers released a statement that included the following:

"We intend to vigorously challenge these findings and penalties through every avenue available to us and look forward to an ethical and impartial arbitration process."

Charania later reported that arbitration isn't on the table, but L.A. could bring this before a Judge in court. And if that avenue overturns the penalties the NBA just announced, Adam Silver and the league could have a lot of egg to wipe off their faces.

But for now, it's only fair to give Silver, a commissioner who's taken plenty of understandable criticism in recent years, some flowers.

Based on nothing more than the publicly available reporting from Torre, there was no reasonable explanation for Kawhi's deals outside of cap circumvention. But that didn't necessarily mean Silver would hand down severe punishments.

Ballmer is the league's richest individual owner. That carries a lot of weight. Silver has long seemed reluctant to do anything that might jeopardize his standing with the players. These moves opened up the potential for conflict on both fronts. It took some courage to do that.

Loser: NBA Fans

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In the immediate aftermath of this news going public, it felt like this story finally had a resolution. And for fans who care about the integrity of the NBA and professional basketball generally, the resolution made sense.

But within an hour, we were reminded that this fight could drag on for months (or even years) through litigation. The saga may be far from over.

And if this becomes a very ugly, very public catfight between the league and its wealthiest owner, it's the fans who might suffer.

In the last few years, the NBA has had to ban a player (Jontay Porter) for life for fixing prop bets. It had an active head coach indicted for alleged participation in rigged poker games. It had other former and current players (including Terry Rozier) indicted for other betting schemes.

Each story on its own might be easy to survive. Stacked on top of each other, it starts to make it hard for NBA fans to trust the league.

For however long Silver remains the commissioner of the NBA, he needs to fight tooth and nail to restore some of the credibility it may have lost. Wednesday's news suggests he may be ready for that fight.