The Big Suey: Kawhi (Don't) Wanna Earn (feat. Pablo Torre)

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Miente los quiles de biaquien rea ni comían. El grinch de sugaridas u plan definía.

Benso, comaru nar susenas festivas, y leino un idea de las mar retorsidas, sarpiquar sus papitas severde, constazón de pepinillo, y cones feos qualcetines, vermi retorsido motivo.

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Welcome to the Big Sue,

presented by DraftKings. Why are you listening to this show? It's a podcast that seems very similar to the other Dan Lebatard podcast.
I'm sorry, I'm not going to apologize for that.

In fact, the only difference seems to be this imaging. I have been tempted in restaurants just walking past tables to grab somebody's fries if they're just there.
That hasn't happened to you guys.

I've done it. And now, here's the marching man to nowhere, fat face, and the habitual liar.

This episode of the Dan Levitard Show with Stew Gods is presented by DraftKings.

DraftKings, the crown is yours. Pablo Torre joins us now.

By the way, Greg Cody, Dominique said on his show the other day that the Colts are a team that is not getting enough attention or respect and that they were his pick for which team would be surprisingly good.

I'll pass that along to Greg.

I wasn't talking to you. I was talking to Greg.

Okay.

Nice chatting with you. Pablo, are you joining us right now from the Harvard Club?

Why am I being doxxed on your program, in which I thought I was a friend of the show, a family member, in fact, and now you're alleging

verifiable claims?

You can't prove that. I'm sorry I reported something that makes you uncomfortable.

You think this is crimson? You think this red is crimson? No, it's something else. You're at the Harvard Club, aren't you? No, it's off maroon.
That's off maroon.

Pablo Torre finds out has exploded as a podcast. Today is his first day and its first day with the athletic.
And he started with a beast of a story that took

seven months

to report and that he was very nervous that somebody else was going to break before he reported what was in 3,487 documents.

So starting first, tell the people what it is that you reported today at 5 a.m.

Yeah, so people may recall how there's this. What is happening?

That's how we're introducing when you drop a Pablo.

When you drop a Pablo, when a Pablo drops, that's our imaging. Chris Cody has had seven months to produce imaging for this story.
It's good, right? And that's what he has produced. This is...

This is how we

Lance Stevenson blowing in my ear. This is how a Pablo gets dropped.

This is how we celebrate the biggest story in sports today.

So tell us what it is, please.

Whoever just yelped, it's good, right?

I just... Who said that? The sweet nothings, the sweet nothings.

It's a sweet something,

is what I've brought you guys today. 2019, the NBA investigates, okay, how did the Clippers get Kawhi Leonard? They found no proof, right?

This was something that the NBA was infuriated by around the league. It was the Lakers, it was the Raptors, everybody wondering how did Steve Bommer and the Clippers get Kawhi Leonard.

We have an episode that explains, and I think like 4K detail how it happened in terms of how Steve Bommer, the owner of the Clippers, has paid Kawhi Leonard off of the books using, and this is where the story gets wild because this is about the extension Kawhi signs in 2021, but it involves, true to the alleged setting that I'm in, two Harvard graduates, two Democratic politicians starting what turns out to be a $2.3 billion

value-weighted scheme around climate change and saving the planet that brings in as the following a roster of endorsers.

Robert Downey Jr., Drake, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cindy Crawford, Orlando Bloom.

The list goes on.

What has never been reported, though, until today is the most important, most highly paid endorsement deal they signed, which was more than four times the combined value of every other celebrity.

And that endorsement deal was signed with one of probably, I would say, the worst pitchmen when it comes to like good athletes in America. And it's Kawhi Leonard.

And this was a company that was funded to the tune of $50 million by Steve Bommer, another Harvard graduate. and the owner, of course, the richest owner in all of sports.
And so we have documentation.

We have have seven sources. We have a source voice modulated on tape, kind of whispering some facts into your ear if you listen on YouTube or as a podcast.

It's a story that's an 80-minute documentary we made. And it's, yeah, it's unbelievable.
It's crazy. It's actually a crazy thing to sort of pour through.

Is there any proof at all that Kawhi Leonard did any work at all to earn that $28 million, anything other than basketball, play basketball for the Clippers?

Which he's only kind of done, I would argue, the basketball part.

That's my favorite part is that typically in a story like this, you say, okay, there's no evidence and that's a problem. Here, the absence of evidence is kind of the evidence.

He was signed to a $28 million endorsement contract and did nothing. Nobody has proof of anything that he did.
Zero things. No likes, no retweets, no posts, no tree plantings.

This was a company that was supposed to plant trees to zero out your carbon footprint and help save the planet.

Kawhi did nothing that anyone could find. There's no evidence on the internet anywhere.

And that to me feels like all of the evidence you need in terms of this being a no-show job if you're an endorser of something, I would argue.

Pablo, part of the gall of this scam is the stupidity of it.

Wouldn't it have been extremely easy just to have Kawhi film a couple of PSAs endorsing this whole project instead of doing absolutely nothing.

It's a great question that Callaeus Campbell just asked, I believe, because who just asked that question. It's a really good question.

There's sloppiness in this. There's sloppiness all over the place because yes, all you had to do was do a couple of things, but the whole, this is the legend, right?

Like people are saying, oh, you're snitching on Kawhi Leonard. Kawhi Leonard, to me, is not the villain of this story.

Kawhi Leonard is maybe the most clear-cut example of a straight-up capitalist, right? Boardman gets paid. Dude wants money.
Dude doesn't want to work. He wants to get paid.

And so Kawhi Leonard could have done some of that stuff to give everybody plausible deniability. He preferred not to.
He signed a deal in the contract, which we have.

We have the signed and executed endorsement contract.

And it's Kawhi Leonard, his autograph, right next to the guy who turns out to be, by the way, the youngest speechwriter in White House history for Bill Clinton, Andre Cherny, the co-founder of Aspiration.

In that contract, he has outs that our pal David Sampson poured over in which you clearly see Kawhi was also not obligated to do anything.

They just didn't count on people like me, I guess, ever caring enough to follow the clues down the rabbit hole and find out that, oh, wait, this was a job that required you to do nothing and you did nothing.

And so that feels like a problem. Gotta wanna learn, gotta wanna earn.
Kawhi don't want to learn, Kawhi don't want to earn.

Pablo, if they did what Calais Campbell was suggesting, which is just a little thing here or there for Kawhi to do, wouldn't that, if I could check the counterpoint, wouldn't that have then tipped someone off to this endorsement he's doing?

And then maybe we would have found out that Bomber was funding. And of course, it's like, hey,

the bell rings that, wow, that's probably not a good thing for the salary cap. Yeah, it's a that's also, I mean, logical question.

Now, the thing about this story, though, is that aspiration, while totally obscure until really like it goes viral this morning,

they were announced to be the 23-year, $300 million plus founding sponsor of the Intuito.

They were announced.

We have press conference footage of Steve Palmer sitting next to Joe Sandberg, the guy who's now pled guilty to two cuts of wire fraud, by the way, and a nine-figure fraud as investigated by the DOJ and now still the SEC.

So this was out there. It's just that nobody knew Kawhi was working for them.

But, but, Zaz, to your point, like, the reason I found out about this is because in the bankruptcy filing, because the company has, of course, collapsed and it's

into disgrace and financial ruin, in the bankruptcy filing, you see the list of creditors.

And buried there, which was publicly available, by the way, was this line item that said $7 million outstanding to KL2 Aspire LLC.

And I looked up what that was in the California Secretary of State database, and it was, oh, Kawhi Leonard's LLC. Interesting.
I then Google, did he ever do anything for Aspirate?

Because I'd never seen that. And it's weird to have Kawhi Leonard as one of your top endorsers.
And there was nothing. And at that point, that's when I'm like, something doesn't add up here.

And it turns out a lot didn't add up for anybody. Pablo, this is a bombshell at the foot of the NBA right now.
And the commissioner.

What do you imagine the repercussion might be of this story?

Before you answer that, Pablo, let me just hear some Calais Campbell sound to see if Pablo's got it right because he does indeed find out that whoever that is speaking in that modulated voice sounds like Callaeus Campbell.

I thought that was a compliment. Yes.

Wow. I think that is a compliment as well.

Sorry that I don't know.

Yes.

So friendly. What are the friends?

Yeah. I mean,

this is the parlor game that I find absolutely fascinating because Steve Balmer, to reiterate, has A, denied any wrongdoing, didn't know about any of this, says it's provably false.

I await the proof, frankly.

But nonetheless, Steve Ballmer is the richest owner, not just in the NBA, but all of sports, right? He's the good guy who saved the Clippers from noted racist Donald Sterling.

He has Barack Obama sitting on court's side. All of this stuff means he's both powerful and a good spokesperson for the league that wants to be on the good guy side of things.

But yet you have this other dynamic where Steve Ballmer, who paid for the Intuit Dome with personal private money, no public funds, right? Great on him.

He has spent so much money to expand his front office because that's uncapped.

Here you have the problem of why Adam Silver called in 2019, according to the athletic report on the investigation, a cardinal sin of alleged capped circumvention in which the NBA, per that report, had outlined possible consequences.

Forfeiture of draft picks, million-dollar-plus fines, at the most extreme end, the nullification of contracts for the players whose salaries were circumvented.

So I go back to history and I'm like, what's the last time this happened?

And the only analogous case in terms of documentation and salary capture convention was the Minnesota Timberwolves, Joe Smith, which I don't know if anybody in the container even remembers, but Joe Smith and Glenn Taylor, the owner of the T-Wolves, had worked out a side deal, and it was written on paper because they were afraid Glenn Taylor was going to die before the completion of that contract.

It's a total side fascination.

But this has the potential to be the biggest salary

cap crime that we've seen. Yes, yes, $28 million.

And by the way, for the T-Wolves in that era, in the 90s, five first-round picks, suspensions for the owner of the team, for Glenn Taylor, as well as other punishments down the line. But But

this is tied into, again, an ongoing SEC DOJ investigation into fraud by this green bank, this climate change-friendly company, whose biggest investor, or at least most important, influential, notable investor was Steve Ballmer, who put in $50 million of his own money.

I mean, this is not merely a story about caps or convention. This is now a question that the seven sources I spoke to are asking.
What else did Steve Ballmer know about?

How does one guy have influence over this company in this way and yet total ignorance about everything else?

Just a question being okay.

That Joe Smith thing happened over 20 years ago and Glenn Taylor's still around, which is also interesting.

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If your college football team is in the mix, congratulations. You've made it this far.
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Don Lebatard. Pablo leads all of podcasting in reading while smiling.
If you listen to ESPN Daily, he sounds like he's having the time of his life. Stugats.
Coming up next.

I'm going to tell you how the Savannah bananas changed. How do you know I'm Savannah bananas?

How do you know I'm smiling? That's how I find my vocal range. Sometimes I just say Savannah bananas.

Savannah bananas. Yeah.
This is the Don Lebatar show with the Stugats.

Legacy Media, they have to independently verify your bombshell reporting, but the NBA did just announce several media partnerships. They're basically on every night.

They have so many big-time media partners. So far, I haven't seen ESPN touch this story.
Do you actually think this gets traction beyond where it is right now?

I know you have a big partnership with the Athletic. They're going to be pumping it out there.
But do you think the big-time partners of the NBA are going to touch this with a 10-foot pole?

It's a great question. It's a really good question.

We await.

We await.

I feel like what is an obvious, obvious decision? to, of course, cover the biggest news in basketball today.

And by the way, it's not merely, oh, wow, we have to do this whole thing. They spent 80 minutes on this documentary.
How can we possibly do that in a segment?

The question would be, what should the MBA do if these allegations are

proven? Right? Like, how do you handle this?

Capsure Convention and Kawhi Leonard,

that is a, it's a talker. And so, by the way, like, yeah,

I don't know who has or hasn't covered this stuff yet, but I can tell you that the NBA is,

they were not aware.

This is not a story they had previously investigated and said, oh, there's nothing here.

This is catching them with a level of surprise that I think says a lot about how secret this entire operation was.

Pablo, you named also celebrities who were listed as endorsers and had some involvement with this company. So were they duped or were they potentially in on what was going on?

They seem to be victims.

That said, I I think the question of like, what are you obligated to know about the thing you give your name to is a thing I think about all the time working with you guys.

But also when it comes to people trying to be good guys who are getting into partnerships with people who are not so good, actually.

The question would be, Leonard DiCaprio, did you know, or Robert Downey Jr., when you made that commercial that we put into the episode, did you know what you were really endorsing?

A question that many celebrities have fallen into traps about, in fairness to them. So that seems all logical.

But when you're alleged to be the greatest investor of the last 20 years, a guy and Steve Bommer, who is a titan of industry, again, the sixth richest person in the world, who has a personal relationship to the players involved here.

And by that, I mean the actual executives at this company that you partnered with them. 23 years, $300 million,

right?

How is it that you don't know would be the question. And that's a different question for a celebrity than a businessman.
Pablo, this is a cap sport. This is an unfair advantage.

I imagine other teams are pretty pissed off about this. But also, I got to imagine across all the cap sports in this country, there might be some teams and owners that are a little bit nervous.

Is it likely that Steve Ballmer just invented this idea and was the first to execute it? Or do you think the league has to do some asking around right now in terms of punitive measures?

Because this might be a bigger problem than just this story. Aaron Ross Powell, yeah, if you think about every owner's foremost incentive as self-interest, then the question becomes,

what else have you guys been doing? You know, what have you guys been up to?

I doubt that there has been a story with this level of documentation and depth in terms of how they tried to do it that was only caught again because the company collapsed into bankruptcy.

But I think it's interesting, right?

If you think about the room where they have to debate this stuff, the foremost voice when it it comes to complaints to the league office about how small market teams have basically been crushed by rich guys now, these new billionaires, the new owners, the richest guys in sports history like Steve Ballmer, that team has been the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Historically, they always raised this stuff. They can tell the difference between what they can do and what they can't.
That Ballmer, for instance, could.

That team happens to be the team that won the trade for Kawhi Leonard, that won the title using the guy that they got in Jake Ilders Alexander, who won the MVP in the finals and in the regular season and won a title this year.

And so it's just interesting.

I just wonder, like, what does that team have to say, given that their trade partner happens to be maybe the entity that they should be philosophically opposed to, but in this personal context,

you know, maybe that's a different calculus.

I should clarify some of the word choices I had earlier when I called it the biggest salary cap crime that there is. This isn't an actual crime.
It's just within the context of basketball.

I don't think that we've had anything around the salary cap that has a player of this magnitude or dollar amount of this magnitude.

The language there is important and also speaks to the whole thing of like in the NBA, there is a justice system. There are laws that the federal government ostensibly cares nothing about.

The difference here in what we report in the story and very carefully report, using again seven sources who work for the company, is that the very thing that is getting the Clippers into hot water today because of this reporting is the thing that has caused those seven sources to actively wonder about what else Steve Bommer might have been aware of, which is directly relevant to what the SEC and the DOJ are curious about.

We are not alleging anything. We are simply saying this is a sports story that that has actual resonance.

Even if the one thing is not a crime, the question is, what else in the world of legality might actually be connected?

Pablo, rather than the league possibly voiding Kawhi Leonard's contract, would the better punishment be that the Clippers have to keep Kawhi Leonard? Yeah, I thought about this one too.

This whole trade, man, like, it's funny. Like, do you, if you're the Clippers right now, it's kind of a,

it's, it's a bit of a blessing in disguise if you think that Kawhi Leonard is no longer worth the max plus contract that he's been signed to, right?

If he's not healthy, would be the operative question.

All of this, though, it reminds me, right? Like, man, it was such the obvious choice at the time to get Kawhi Leonard.

And Ballmer looked like a genius for doing whatever he did to get him because there's no better player than a prime Kawhi Leonard coming off a title with the Raptors, two-way player, all that stuff.

And now it's like, yeah, welcome to sports, Steve, is a bit of what's happened here.

The double insult, the double bind is this story today for a guy that you may not even want in the same way anymore because his body turned out to be not trustworthy either.

Do we know if trees were actually planted? Because like Dan said, like, well, it isn't actually illegal. It's just them getting around the salary cap.

But if they're raising money to replant trees and they're just using that money to pay celebrities to do nonsense, then crimes might have actually been committed.

Oh, I mean, there, look, so the co-founder of the, of the company, Joe Sandberg, who is a big Democrat politician in California, pled guilty. Two counts of wire fraud, nine-figure scheme,

all that stuff. Guilty.

There is, but by the way, the climate change pose, right? Like Trump's administration comes to an end, the first one, and people are like, it's time for the good guys to make some bank.

And so their logo, their motto was, clean rich is the new filthy rich. And then part of the investigation, Billy, and it's, again,

a very good thought, is did you guys even plant the trees?

And the source that we have in the episode points out that in their experience at the company, amid all this documentation, there was precisely one visit to a tree planting site.

So

in short, the answer seems to be no.

They didn't really plant all of those trees, despite claiming, by the way, Andre Cherny, who signature was on the contract with Kawhi Leonard, he had claimed, we plant as many trees every day, even more actually, more trees every day than there are in Central Park.

None of that seems to have been true.

I should let everyone know that at 3.30 today Eastern, Pablo and Amin and Samson will be popping up on our YouTube because I'm sure after seven months of investigation that there was a lot left on the cutting room floor.

These are exhaustive episodes.

And so if you want more information than anyone else is going to be able to give you at 3.30 in the afternoon today, Eastern, Pablo will be doing something that, you know, takes you places where I think people might suspect that sports go sometimes, but it's damn near impossible to ever prove this stuff, even when there's an NBA investigation.

What didn't we ask you that we should have asked you? What are the other things here? I don't know how the reporting on this began.

I don't know what you think the most revealing things are that your sources told you.

Oh, I just love the fact that, like, by the way, Doc Rivers was

a guy who invested in this. And so it's just like, okay, we had David to assess the contract language as the former president of the Marlins, guy who signed many sponsorship deals.

We had a mean on because if you don't think that we tapped into his Doc Rivers, you have another thing coming. Yeah.
We have this whole thing, man, this whole thing is absurd. It's just absurd.

He wasn't there for important things. He was just there for his Doc Rivers impersonation.
That is important, Dan. It's a good statement.

I don't think you appreciate how good that impression is. He had an Obama in this episode because Obama comes up.
He had a Doc in this one.

But then it's like truly, and for the David side of things, like just imagine the absolute, just like the pig in manure dynamic of David getting to just put on his little glasses and read a contract.

that he has no idea what's in. And he gets to point out all of this stuff.
That's crazy. Like there's a part of the contract, right? So Kawhi Leonard does nothing, gets paid more than anybody else

combined, more than four times as much as

all the A-list Avengers we mentioned. DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr., just the A-list of A-list.

Drake, Drake, you know, Orlando Bloom.

So meanwhile, Kawhi Leonard has this clause in his contract where he doesn't have to do anything if it's not in accordance with his, quote, beliefs.

And it's just an incredible,

and also he doesn't get paid if he doesn't play for the Clippers. So I'm just like, they can try to spin this in lots of ways.
But on some level, there's an IQ test dynamic. Here are

all the facts we reported. Here are all the documents.
Here's the source on tape. Here's a guy doing a weird Doc Rivers impression.

Here's a guy telling you what these endorsement deals are supposed to be like. What do you think?

I can't really do much more to the NBA than give them all the things they need to allegedly care about the justice that they talk about being a cardinal sin.

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Don Lebatard. This is the quickest it goes.
Hey, this is the quickest it goes.

Stugats. Everybody, this is the quickest it goes.
Yeah. This is the Don Levatar show with the Stugats.

I love the picture that's behind you that they're going to put on the full screen, Dan, of one, David Sampson, looking through the contract in the context of like, OJ Simpson, if I did it.

Like, this is how I would have done this exact thing.

And then I'm also looking at the setup on that screen where Pablo, those are props. Like, that's blank copy paper that you guys stacked up.
It's like, here's 7,000 documents. We go.

Like, that's insane. That's freshly taken.
Those are, like, just reams of paper, correct?

Absolutely not.

How dare you? How dare you? You guys put one paper clip on one little stack on the top and everything else is.

It does look like in the movies when they put $100 bill on the top of the suitcase and everything under it is just a bunch of confetti. The prop person did barely more than Kawhi did for trees.

In fact, they did worse for trees because they wasted trees on all that paper. Looks like a prop contract.

Wow. Prove it.
That's what I have to say to you. Prove it.
You think you can find that out? Prove it. Pablo, to your point, the absurdity of all this.

If they do one commercial with Kawhi Leonard,

you already said that. All right, we got that.
We got that. Thank you.
We got you.

It's absurd. Pablo, see you later.
Pablo,

this whole thing is avoided.

He's one of the great defensive tackles in South Florida history. You're going to treat him like that? He has a real question.
Thank you, Pablo. Defensive energy.
Great reporting.

Pablo Torre finds out. Go check it out.
It's already exploded. The original tweet this morning about the Pablo episode is over 3 million views because he's the only one who has this information.

He's going to be the only one for a while. He'll be ahead of this story.
3.30 live on YouTube. He will give you more information.

We're going to get out of that now because we've got football to get to. Good to see you, Pablo.
Thank you for the reporting. Thank you for the work from the Harvard Club.

Having seen the episode, I will tell you guys that this part made me laugh because if you don't know what the story is about, Amen, David, and Pablo talk for 15 minutes, a full 15 minutes at the top of the episode without telling you exactly what the story is about.

And it reminded me of a mistake I made many years ago.

My reporting on the Dallas Cowboys White House many years ago, where Michael Irvin had a home where the players away from their wives partied,

I put that in a column about 20 paragraphs in

in a story about Eric Rhett going to a nightclub and Super Bowl partying. So 20 paragraphs into a story.
I didn't actually put in that the Bucks had one of these too that they called the Bat Cave.

But that is correct. And the thing that the Dallas Cowboys did that I was reporting, I thought wasn't as important as what it is that you're reporting.

I don't understand why it is you guys talked for a full 12 minutes before telling us what the hell the story was. Hold on, hold on, hold on.

Because hold on, Dan, did you watch the sixth sense and be like,

he waited till the end to tell me that he saw dead people?

Come on. What are you, what are you doing? Spoiler alert.

Spoiler alert.

Also, there's a bat cave? What? Why are you even holding out on me? Good talking to you. See you later.
Thank you. Good talk.

Good work. Tip into the

pop latori finds out. Tip line.
Batcave?

You didn't even answer how the reporting on this started. Maybe we'll find out at 3.30 when he sits down with David Sampson and Amin Al Hassan.
So you guys are in agreement because you guys are all

saying, oh, this happens all the time, but we don't have very much proof of this happening all the time.

I don't think so.

I think eventually... Look how sloppy this was now that we're getting this information, and we're just finding out about it now.
Like,

I don't think that this happens all the time. There was one high-profile incident of this happening in the NFL, and it was a little slap on the wrist.

There was salary cap circumvention with John Elway and Terrell Davis. The league docked the Broncos a third-round draft pick and fined them $2 million.

I don't know what the penalties on this are going to be.

The NBA, as Pablo just told you, is going to be scrambling to figure out how to penalize the Clippers for this because I will say to you, once you're screwing with the integrity of the structure of the league,

the Lakers were going to get Kawhi Leonard, put him with LeBron, and change how the league looked.

And the Clippers, the laughing stock, of Los Angeles for the entire time they've been in Los Angeles before Kawhi Kawhi Leonard did something that landed Kawhi Leonard.

There is no way that the league handles this in a way that is soft. Something is going to come down on Ballmer.
And it's not because Silver's a badass.

It's because of how mad all the other owners are going to be about finding out about this. Mickey Harrison is going to go into the Hall of Fame this week.

And I assure you that the other owners are going to be infuriated that there is something that looks like proof on, oh, that's how they did it.

That's how the Laughingstock Clippers managed to convince Kawhi and

Uncle Dennis to

go to the Laughingstock Los Angeles franchise. I think it's fun to imagine how David Stern would have handled this if he were commissioner.
Because Adam Silver, I mean, come on, you know?

It's not going to be silver, though. It's going to be the owners.
Like, silver works for the owners. The owners are going to dictate what the penalty is on this.
And I don't... think it'll be soft.

Do you guys, we remember a couple months ago, we were talking about, do you remember where you were when the Kawhi transaction went down? And most of us actually had a memory of that.

You remember why we had a memory of that?

Because it was being positioned as the Clippers just saved the NBA from the next big super team because it was well assumed that Kawhi was teaming up with LeBron and going to the Lakers.

There were all sorts of reports of meetings and what was being asked. And then like a thief in the night came Steve Ballmer and the Clippers.
And it was all predicated on that Paul George trade.

And then we saw the whole picture come together.

But when this deal first happened, everybody was super thankful that it did because the league was saved and it was going to be more parody, especially in Los Angeles.

And don't forget, there were all these rumors at the time of what the uncle was asking. of teams when it came to signing his nephew.

It was, you know, potentially private jet whenever he wants and it was buying a home and it was endorsement deals. It was ownership stake, and it's like

we can't give you any of that.

You're starting to look at Kawhi's entire career a little bit differently because I think if I fell on one side, I was pro-Kawhi in what happened with the Spurs, but this is just another element of shadiness that makes you revisit that.

Oh, but I don't, I'm with Pablo on this in not blaming Kawhi for being maximum capitalist mercenary. The salary cap in general is a stupidity.
It's because guys like Ballmer can't control themselves.

When they want something, they know exactly how to buy it.

And so I'd like to see all of those people bidding maximum amount of dollars because you want to pick Jerry Jones against Daniel Snyder and see who wants the quarterback more and see how much that money is going to rise.

The salary cap is a stupidity because these owners, all powerful owners, cannot control themselves when it comes to this sort of thing.

And seeing Steve Ballmer want to get in this game so badly when he's the sixth richest man in the world, you know how these owners work.

These are their playthings, but you think they're going to be less competitive with their playthings than they are about money?

These other owners are going to read this this morning and that's going to dictate the penalty. It's not going to be about Stern, Silver, any of that.
It's every owner waking up this morning.

Imagine Ishbia.

Well, this is pre-Ishbia, but all of these, somebody with Ishbia's mindset seeing this and being like, wait a minute, it looks like they cheated to get somebody because they don't care about our rules when it comes to keeping things equitable.

If the punishment is not as punitive as maybe you're making it sound it should be, would that be a sign that other owners don't want their business to come out as well?

That's why I'm super curious because I'm sure you have some small market teams that understand what they're going up against in that league.

They don't have certain advantages and now the large markets are going above and beyond the league rules to acquire some of these people. They're a part of the league, too.

They are shareholders in the league too.

But to the question that I asked Pablo, I gotta imagine Balmer can't possibly be the first person that considered something like this.

And nor is Kawhi the first person to ask. I've told you guys before the amount of asks that LeBron's people made when they got to Miami because they knew what they were bringing to Miami.

The answer was no.

Please give us hundreds of season tickets. Hundreds.
You know what those were? Worth the first year. Hundreds of season.

Imagine what hundreds of seasons of tickets, season tickets would be for the LeBron James crew.

There's nothing wrong with making the ass. I learned this.

I told you guys this story. I don't know if you remember this at the Clevelander.
One of Stugats' friends came in one day and it was Stugatz's friend.

And so that person came in and made me take, I'm going to say, 45 minutes worth of pictures with him and his kid. 45 minutes.
But with, because it was Stugatz's friend, I did it.

And then at the end of it, I was 40 minutes past my expiration date. The guy looks at me and says, can you call your father and ask him to come in?

And I look at Stugatz and Stugatz's, Stugatz's response was, yeah, you just keep asking until they say no. Were you blinking? Like, what was going on?

Like, why did you take so many photos?

New pose, like different spots in the studio. Like, what happened?

it's a good question you can be an awkward photo taker about like 70 of the times yeah the eyes are closed i don't blame a player for wanting more and more money in this situation i don't think that this is going to do anything to kawaii leonard's legacy that he wanted more money He blinked, obviously.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. No one would just take 45 and blink for fun.

I remember a lunch we had where a kid came and we took a couple pictures with the kids and that got really, that got dicey because the kids sat in Dan's seat and it was a whole thing.

Oh, yeah, that's all.

gary was talking to us about nazis it was a crazy meeting what what's on me that's on you for you know agreeing to pose for 45 minutes worth of photos that's ridiculous i mean come on

you know and the other thing is we're still trying to wrap our head around you burying the lead on that story where you got the the irvin white house in the 20th paragraph Where's your news judgment on something like that?

I mean, it seems like an immorality. It seems like something that players having a house where they have affairs.
Yeah. So why wasn't that your lead? Again, an immorality.

It's just a, I mean, it's a little thing on the side. It's not this story.
It's not a story that has those kind of ramifications. It's just a gossipy TMZ thing.
It's bigger.

It was bigger because it was the Cowboys.

Exactly. If I'd reported that it was the Tampa Bay Bucks at the time, nobody would have cared.
Zagaki. That's the way you do that.

That should have been in the documentary, the Jerry Jones documentary. Greg.
I didn't see that.

It was in the documentary because there was nothing fresh in that documentary. They stole everybody else's reporting.
I'll mention that to Greg. I think he saw it.

Is there any reason that you don't remember Greg's signature lines? Because Zagaki is something I was expecting you to say. Even though he's very much on camera as Greg.
That kind of thing.

Can we come up with a contest to get you a new expression to utter?

Because you're using the old recycled tired ones, and I'm wondering whether it is we should just have a contest where you take applicants for a saying you're going to start using now.

That sounds like something Greg would be interested in.

Trailers for sale or rent.

Rooms to let 50 cents.

No food, no pole, no pets.

I ain't got no cigarettes,

Thank you.

Thank you, everyone. That applause is really heartwarming.

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