While the Clippers could theoretically sue the NBA to try to reverse the penalties they received as a result of the year-long investigation into salary cap circumvention, the team and owner Steve Ballmer — who was suspended for one year as part of the punishment — would have a difficult timing winning, writes Michael McCann of Sportico.
The Clippers put out a couple of statements through Ballmer’s lawyer calling the investigation a “witch hunt” and suggesting the team was considering legal recourse.
However, as McCann explains, the Clippers have no way to appeal the ruling because the players’ association and Kawhi Leonard agreed to the star forward’s punishment. The NBA’s investigation found the Clippers conspired to circumvent the cap by funneling money to Leonard through at least four different no-show endorsement deals, violating article XIII of the Collective Bargaining Agreement.
In addition to the finality of the league’s ruling, courts often defer to the decisions of private memberships associations such as the NBA, per McCann, and “intervene only when they act arbitrarily or capriciously.” There are several other legal reasons why the NBA appears likely to win a potential lawsuit, and it would further ostracize Ballmer and the Clippers if they attempted it, McMann adds.
Here are a few more notes regarding the investigation:
Brian Windhorst of ESPN argues Ballmer and the Clippers should stand down, take the loss, and move on. As Windhorst writes, in the only previous major punishment involving salary cap circumvention in 2000, the Timberwolves were able to recoup two of the five first-round picks they were initially docked by having then-owner Glen Taylor and then-president of basketball operations Kevin McHale accept their season-long suspensions and otherwise maintain a low profile. Some in the league believe Ballmer is unlikely to go that route, but a rival general manager said he’d be wise to consider it. “The first thing they could do is apologize,” the Western Conference GM told Windhorst. “To their fans and to the league. That would be novel of them. Then go from there.”
The investigation into the Clippers and Leonard was initiated after of a series of reports from investigative journalist Pablo Torre on his podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting and answered several questions regarding the findings of the investigation in a fascinating interview with Dan Shanoff of The Athletic. Asked if he was surprised by anything in the report, Torre said the note-taking from president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank stood out, adding that he was “really impressed by the detail that we got, even as I had questions about what was not in it.”
“The sensation that I have felt personally and have felt in our audience — such that I can get a sense of what has been a head-spinning day — is that people have been almost delighted that maybe we can hold the richest people in the world to something resembling a standard of accountability,” Torre said of the public interest in the investigation. “I think that is what I feel most acutely: That maybe that’s possible. That maybe a collection of documentary evidence and human sources who are brave enough to talk to a journalist, and months of research that have been vetted legally and otherwise, can combine to create something like consequences at a time at which those extraordinarily wealthy people seem to be able to avoid them. I think that we have the ability to do something that the rest of our culture is yearning for, which is make people who are too rich to care about anything resembling the public interest worry that maybe they need to tell us the truth.”