00:00The breaking story over the last half hour or so is the NBA dropping the hammer on the Los Angeles
00:06Clippers, as well as their owner Steve Ballmer and Kawhi Leonard for doing everything in their power of circumventing the
00:15salary cap by inventing companies to pay Kawhi Leonard off the book, so to speak, so they could stay under
00:24that salary cap.
00:25And we're talking a ton, and I mean a ton, of draft capital with what they're doing here.
00:32But keep this in mind, in addition to the ridiculous amount of draft picks that they're not going to be
00:39able to get here, Craig, keep in mind that they're 21, 2022, 23, 24, 25, 2, 26, 29, 30, 31,
00:4932, and 33, 20, 33 draft picks.
00:53Yeah, they gave those away to acquire Kawhi Leonard and Paul George.
00:57So in addition to all of those picks they no longer have, they also don't have SGA, which, of course,
01:04they traded away.
01:05They basically gave up 11 picks for three total playoff series victories during their time, and now they're not going
01:15to be able to get any draft picks again for the next five years.
01:18If you want to talk about debilitating and destroying a franchise, that's exactly what the NBA did without basically booting
01:27them out of the league, Craig, and in epic Kawhi fashion, talking about integrity and respect for the game,
01:34and that he entered into the contract with, you know, in good faith.
01:39But he's basically saying, I take responsibility for my uncle being the agent and cutting this deal, and it's my
01:47fault for the people on my inner circle.
01:49No personal responsibility like he had any idea this was going on, but he blames himself for the fact that
01:56he let his uncle be his manager from day one in the NBA.
02:00It's a little strange to me.
02:01But the whole story is one of the more strange things that I have seen.
02:05I mean, I have, you know, sort of watched this from the beginning, and as somebody that, you know, certainly
02:12is a journalist and has done this for a really long time, especially with Major League Baseball,
02:17you know, when this story first came out with Pablo Torre, who was reporting on this,
02:24I got to admit, I was very skeptical of this whole story, because I thought to myself, how is out
02:30of nowhere, this story so, you know, so well reported, and no one is talking about it, and nothing is
02:39happening.
02:39And then, you know, this took such a long time for anything to happen, and then I thought maybe my
02:45skepticism was accurate, that, you know, I mean, maybe this was really not a story.
02:49And then the NBA comes out and says it's not a story.
02:53And I thought to myself, wait a second here, we spent a lot of time wasting time discussing some potential
03:01improprieties about an owner in the NBA.
03:03I think we were too tough on the owner in the NBA, Steve Ballmer.
03:06I thought, I think we were.
03:08And then a week later, the Clippers are giving up five first-round picks?
03:13What happened to that story a week ago?
03:15Joe, I don't understand this one at all.
03:17Now, I am going to guess.
03:21Now, look, sometimes I'm wrong about stuff.
03:23Like, for example, when Luka got traded, you know what I said, Joe?
03:27I said that Dallas is going to win the trade, because there's probably something that we don't know about Luka.
03:31Honestly, that's how dumb the trade looked.
03:33I was like, wait a second.
03:35There's something that we don't know about Luka that's going to come out.
03:39It ended up costing the career of the guy on the GM of the Mavericks, whatever his name is, Harrison,
03:45I think his name, he's gone.
03:46He's not going to ever be a GM again.
03:47And so in this particular, right, thanks.
03:50And so in this case, I was thinking the same thing.
03:52Like, this can't be true.
03:55It's just so weird that the story is being reported and nothing is being said about it.
03:59So that's why my take on this, Joe, is as follows.
04:02I got to believe that something happened in the last week.
04:06I know it sounds crazy, and I'll be wrong, and I'll be back on the air, and I'll be wrong
04:10tomorrow.
04:11I bet you my prediction is by tomorrow when we're on the air, we're going to hear Adam Silver say
04:16that we found something over the past seven days that changed our mind.
04:19It has to be, because how is it possible that the investigation proved nothing less than 10 days ago, and
04:26now all of a sudden, the Clippers are being, you know, mauled like SMU was back in the day in
04:30college football.
04:31Like, it's like they got the death penalty, it feels like.
04:33It's a lot.
04:33It's a lot.
04:35And Kawhi Leonard is forced to give back $700,000, which is not much.
04:38So, Joe, I'm going to be wrong, and I'll take my L tomorrow on the show when Adam Silver just
04:43comes out and does a regular, you know, upon further review.
04:48I got to believe there's some smoking gun that came out recently because it makes no sense whatsoever what has
04:55happened in the last two weeks.
04:56It makes nothing.
04:58Well, it also feels like, Craig, like this is more, you know, performance-based than anything else, because you can't
05:06tell me for a year they didn't know this.
05:08They knew this, right?
05:09So why now?
05:11But also, let's really look at the punishment here.
05:13You have a billionaire owner who you're saying can't hang out with the team now, and you're going to slap
05:19what a $30 million fine, which he has in the couch cushion.
05:23None of this matters.
05:24That's my problem.
05:26No, the picks matter.
05:26No, the picks.
05:27The picks?
05:28That's a lot.
05:29No?
05:29They had already crippled their franchise getting Paul George and Kawhi to begin with, so this to me is all
05:38performance-based.
