Bill Simmons and producer Mike Tollin held Los Angeles Clippers season tickets for basically two decades, and Simmons just email-dumped them over the exact scandal he once told Pablo Torre to knock off reporting. The guy who spent a week mocking Torre for “pretending” to be a journalist is now reading a breakup letter to a team the NBA just gutted over the story Torre broke.
Simmons revealed the letter on his Sept. 18 podcast episode, and according to Awful Announcing, it doesn’t read like a man quietly letting a contract lapse. “The Clippers broke their contract with fans and season ticket-holders,” he read aloud, “so we would like to break ours.”
That’s not a lease non-renewal — that’s a divorce filing.
The anger has a receipt. Simmons admitted he was told for months that nothing was wrong: “Our connections within the organization kept assuring us that Pablo’s reporting was bullshit and nothing bad would happen,” he said, right up until the league proved the opposite. Simmons dumped his Clippers season tickets because the people he trusted inside that organization lied to him.
Pablo Torre’s reporting is what forced the NBA’s hand.
Torre first reported that Kawhi Leonard had signed a no-show endorsement deal with Aspiration, a company Clippers owner Steve Ballmer had personally poured tens of millions into before it went bankrupt. He found the thread through an LLC tied to Leonard listed as a creditor in Aspiration’s bankruptcy filing, then got a former Aspiration employee on record saying the deal existed purely to dodge the salary cap. Leonard was never actually required to do any endorsement work. That’s the tell on every no-show contract.
The number only grew from there, landing north of $28 million across multiple no-show-style deals once Daktronics and Boingo Wireless entered the picture, according to Yahoo Sports. ESPN initially reported the league had found no evidence against the Clippers, a story that in hindsight reads less like reporting and more like a favor.
Instead, the NBA came back with a historic ruling.
Five years of stripped first-round picks, Kawhi Leonard traded away — the cap-circumvention scheme that got the Clippers fined is exactly the story Simmons once waved off as somebody else’s problem. Now it’s the franchise-crippling punishment the NBA handed Ballmer, and Simmons is the guy mourning it from the seats he paid full price for.
Dan Le Batard noticed the irony before anyone else bothered to say it out loud. “Hey @BillSimmons,” he wrote on X, “think it might be time for you to have @PabloTorre on again to talk about how he’s not a journalist?” according to Awful Announcing’s Meadowlark vertical.
Le Batard wasn’t going to let that slide.
The “not a journalist” line is Le Batard’s callback, not something Simmons said word for word. What Simmons actually said, back in the spring on The Rewatchables about Torre’s Bill Belichick reporting, was that he’d “never seen anybody dine on a stupider story for a week and a half while pretending you’re a journalist.”
I’ve gone back and reread that Rewatchables line more than once looking for the part where Simmons turns out to be right. It isn’t there.
Simmons built a media company on the idea that access and platform are what make someone a real journalist: the guy with the group text beats the guy digging through bankruptcy exhibits. Torre’s Kawhi reporting is the cleanest rebuttal to that theory that sports media has produced in years. The job turned out to be finding the LLC buried in a footnote and being right before anyone with a press credential wanted to admit it.
Torre and Simmons actually hashed out the Belichick dispute together on Simmons’ own podcast before any of this Clippers business blew up, which makes the timing of the season-ticket letter land harder, not softer. Once the letter made the rounds, Simmons had a one-line reaction of his own.
https://twitter.com/BillSimmons/status/2101140967176970273
Nowhere in that thread, and nowhere in the podcast, does Simmons connect his fury to the guy who supplied the ammunition. He’s furious about the fire and still won’t say the name of the person who found the match.
Simmons wants the receipt without crediting the guy who found it.
