Five future first-round picks are gone, and a $30 million fine is now attached to the Los Angeles Clippers’ handling of off-court income opportunities for Kawhi Leonard. The NBA announced the sweeping punishment Wednesday after an independent investigation found the organization violated salary-cap circumvention rules. Owner Steve Ballmer has also been suspended from all league and team activities for one year, while Leonard was ordered to pay $700,000. President of Business Operations Gillian Zucker received a one-year suspension without pay, and basketball operations president Lawrence Frank was suspended for six months, according to Reuters.
The investigation found a broader problem than the endorsement deal that originally put the Clippers under scrutiny. According to Wachtell Lipton, team officials helped create endorsement opportunities for Leonard with companies that were doing business with the franchise. Investigators said the Clippers also used their own business relationships to encourage some of those companies to reach deals with Leonard. The report separately found that the team paid personal expenses on behalf of Leonard and people around him without properly accounting for them under league rules.
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More About The Investigation
The probe began after Pablo Torre reported in 2025 that Leonard had a four-year, $28 million agreement with Aspiration, a now-bankrupt sustainability company in which Ballmer had invested. Torre alleged Leonard was not required to perform meaningful work under the deal and that the arrangement was designed to get money to him outside his NBA contract. The independent investigation eventually expanded outside Aspiration and concluded that the Clippers had improperly facilitated multiple outside opportunities for Leonard.
Investigators also focused on Dennis Robertson, Leonard’s uncle and former business manager. The report says Robertson expected the Clippers to help generate roughly $10 million a year in off-court income for Leonard and repeatedly pressed team executives for better opportunities. Rather than report those requests to the league, as NBA rules required, investigators found that Clippers officials continued assisting him. Ballmer was specifically faulted for knowingly trying to help Leonard secure outside income and for approving a Clippers agreement with Aspiration after he knew the company had tied that business to Leonard’s endorsement deal.
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The lost draft capital makes the punishment especially painful for a franchise that already spent heavily to build around Leonard. When the Clippers acquired Paul George from Oklahoma City in 2019, they sent out five first-round picks as part of the blockbuster deal that helped secure Leonard’s commitment in free agency. Now another five first-round selections, covering one pick in each draft from 2029 through 2033, have been forfeited because of conduct tied to Leonard’s tenure.
Neither side is accepting the findings quietly. The Guardian reports that Leonard said he entered the agreements in good faith and denied knowing about any effort to evade the salary cap. The Clippers were more combative, accusing the investigation of being biased and saying they intend to challenge the findings through arbitration.
