We thought we had seen the last of the darkest  days in LA Clippers basketball when owner Donald Sterling was exiled in disgrace.

You remember him, the real estate with the racist reputation.  The bizarre entrepreneur cheap skate.  The one who fled San Diego, ran an NBA team like an LA slumlord, and then was forced out because of racial overtones in the way he ran his businesses.

We all thought the worst was behind us, but now this Clippers catastrophe story came flying across your dining room table.

The NBA completed its 11-month probe of Salary Cap violations perpetrated by the Clippers, its last star player, and supervised by the ringleader owner-Steve Balmer.

The man who saved the franchise from the grasps of the ill-intentioned Sterling, has a net worth of (139B).  Now we find out he helped drive the bargains that gave wealth beyond the wealth that his star Kawhi Leonard earned as an NBA super star.

Everybody has blood on their hands in this Salary Cap scandal.  And the Clippers fans, whomever will be left among the empty seats at the Intuit Dome, will be supporting a team that will be stripped of talent and sentenced to NBA jail thru 2033.

The NBA suspended Ballmer for 1-full year effective at this hour, barring him from his own building, his own team, and removing him from the NBA committees he chaired.

They fined the Clippers (30M) for engineering 4-illegal deals for Leonard, beyond the (50M) per year max contracts he was earning.

They stripped them of 5-first round draft picks from now thru 2033.

They suspended Team President Gillian Zucker for 1-year for authorizing the deals with 4-companies that were also doing business with Ballmer’s just opened Intuit Dome.  And they charged she lied to investigators.

Team GM-Lawrence Frank was slapped with a 6-month suspension for authorizing illegal expense payments to Leonard and his financial advisor.

As for the superstar forward, Kawhi Leonard was fined (700,000) for being part of this deal, months after he told the media he did nothing wrong.  Nice morals-no scruples.

And Leonard’s uncle, Dennis Robertston has been expelled for 5-years from involvement in NBA business.  Nice creative juice stains on his resume.

The pivot point is that Ballmer introduced Leonard to four companies, a scoreboard company, a cell phone company, an insurance company and a banking company for potential endorsement deals.

He mandated to each, his NBA team and the Dome, would do business with them only if they financed endorsement side deals with Leonard.  Ballmer has screamed he did not deliver money to Leonard, but he took in corporate sponsor dollars under the premise, ‘you must do business with the player too’.

Screaming innocence no longer works, when whistleblowers turned over documents that showed how the deals were structured, that the Clippers knew, and sanctioned every move.  And the outcome of this probe comes on the coat-tails of data that Leonard and his handlers made the same financial demands on the Lakers and the Raptors in the past , and both those teams turned evidence into the league.

A paper trail that has led to a modern day scandal, committed by a rich man, and a selfish player, who can no longer be viewed as a special player, person or self-made hero.

Leonard is lucky the NBA did not void his contract and suspend him, because he was not blind to any of this.  It sure taints his reputation as a Hall of Famer and the most famous Aztecs basketball player of all time.

The Players Association signed off on the sanctions, but the sad part is their big money client pays only a small financial penalty for taking upwards of (58M) of illegal payments.  Kawhi goes on to Toronto as if nothing really happened to him.  

Ballmer now owns a franchise that will likely be the equal of the old Clippers under the  last owner, shorthanded in talent, with no stars, and little in the way of improving the product.  Feels like the Sterling era all over again.

Everybody takes a hit in this.  Ballmer says he will sue the NBA.  Leonard says he apologized for a ‘lapse of judgement’ but feels he has a clean slate going to Toronto.  The Union approved the sanctions, and says Leonard must pay the penalties.

And how do you feel now about the owner and his star player?

The first thing that flashed into my mind about Steve Ballmer and Kawhi Leonard, when the sanctions were issued, ‘MONEY & POWER CORRUPT’.  Look what it did to the man who saved the team, and the player who made himself into a superstar.

How sad, how shameful.  People change.  Ballmer and Leonard surely did.

‘MONEY & POWER CORRUPT’.

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