ESPN reported the NBA cleared Steve Ballmer in mid-August. The league itself called that reporting inaccurate. Kawhi Leonard is still sitting in Los Angeles either way.
The Kawhi Leonard-to-Raptors trade was agreed on paper back on June 30. Leonard heads to Toronto, the Clippers get Brandon Ingram, Gradey Dick, two first-round picks, a 2027 pick swap and two seconds, and two months later it’s still not official. The excuse that made sense in July doesn’t hold up in September.
That excuse was the investigation into Steve Ballmer, which started with Pablo Torre’s reporting last year: Clippers sponsor Aspiration allegedly paid Leonard roughly $28 million for what amounted to no real job, a cap workaround wearing an endorsement deal as a costume. That’s the version everybody remembers. By mid-August, ESPN was reporting the NBA had found no evidence Ballmer personally funneled that money through Aspiration, and the league immediately pushed back, calling the report inaccurate and insisting no findings were final. Either way, the smoking gun on Ballmer specifically was never really the holdup anymore.
I spent two years pricing my own writing at fifty bucks a post before it covered rent, so a franchise disputing whether $28 million even happened still messes with my sense of scale. But whichever version of the Ballmer story turns out to be true, the real question is whether the NBA’s still-open probe into other alleged violations eventually voids Leonard’s contract entirely — a nightmare scenario where the Raptors inherit a voided Kawhi Leonard contract after already sending out Ingram, Dick and four total draft assets.
That’s the real risk nobody wants to inherit.
One report has the Raptors themselves increasingly hesitant to finalize a deal they’d have to unwind if that contract gets voided later, which is a very different posture than a team just waiting on a rubber stamp. The Clippers, for their part, have reportedly indicated they’d be fine keeping Leonard if Toronto walks, which tells you this outcome is genuinely open. Here’s the Clippers’ own statement on how the process has gone, courtesy of Shams Charania:
https://twitter.com/ShamsCharania/status/2075293917118136739
Ten months of interviews and tens of thousands of documents is a lot of cooperation for an allegation nobody in the league office will actually call closed. The next real checkpoint for this Kawhi Leonard-Raptors trade is an NBA Board of Governors meeting in mid-September, and Pablo Torre has noted that meeting is chaired by Larry Tanenbaum, the outgoing Raptors owner, whose own team’s stalled trade is riding on how that room handles the broader case.
Leonard, for what it’s worth, reportedly wants to finish his career in Toronto, eligible for a two-year, $123.7 million extension the moment this clears. He won a title and a Finals MVP there in 2019 before he ever left for the Clippers. Two months of limbo hasn’t changed that.
The man deciding this is walking out the door either way.
