The Clippers received one of the harshest punishments in NBA history.
Kawhi Leonard did not.
Despite being found in violation of the same salary-cap rules, he escaped with comparatively little damage.
That contrast has become the biggest question following the league’s salary-cap circumvention ruling, which cost Los Angeles five first-round picks and hit owner Steve Ballmer with a $30 million penalty. Ballmer, Lawrence Frank and Gillian Zucker were also suspended.
Leonard owes $700,000 in restitution. He wasn’t suspended. More importantly, his contract survived.
The NBA’s collective bargaining agreement and the findings of its yearlong investigation help explain how Leonard landed so softly.
The league hired Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to investigate how the Clippers helped generate lucrative off-court opportunities for their star.
Under Article XIII of the CBA, players can be fined, forced to return improper benefits or have their contracts voided for circumvention. The provision allowing suspensions of up to one year, however, specifically applies to team personnel.
So Leonard avoiding suspension isn’t the biggest surprise.
The real escape was keeping his contract.
And that may come down to what investigators could — and could not — prove Leonard personally knew.
Wachtell found Leonard violated the CBA through Dennis Robertson, his uncle and former business representative, who repeatedly pushed Clippers officials to create outside income opportunities for Leonard.
Leonard was hardly unaware of the money.
He signed lucrative endorsement deals generated through those efforts and personally requested changes to the cash and equity structure of his proposed Aspiration agreement.
But the investigation draws an important line between knowing the deals existed and knowing how the Clippers were making them happen.
Wachtell did not find that Leonard personally knew the Clippers were directing business toward companies in exchange for benefits flowing back to him. It also stopped short of concluding Leonard understood that those arrangements amounted to salary cap circumvention.
That gap proved extremely valuable.
Robertson made the demands. Clippers executives worked to satisfy them. Leonard received the benefits.
But Robertson’s position between Leonard and the organization made it considerably harder to establish how much of the machinery Leonard himself understood.
In effect, Robertson became a buffer — and now, whether intentionally or not, something resembling a fall guy.
The report does not say Leonard deliberately used his uncle that way. But Robertson is the person whose conduct established Leonard’s violation while simultaneously providing Leonard separation from the conduct investigators considered most serious.
The assignment of blame drives that point home.
Wachtell identified Ballmer, Zucker and Frank — not Leonard — as the three people “most responsible” for the violations. Robertson, whom Leonard fired in June, has since been banned from NBA business dealings.
Leonard therefore emerged in an unusual position: Investigators determined that his representative broke the rules on his behalf and that Leonard received the resulting benefits, yet they stopped short of finding that Leonard knowingly participated in the Clippers’ method of circumventing the cap.
That distinction appears to have saved him from much worse.
It doesn’t mean Leonard was cleared. He wasn’t.
It means the evidence created enough separation between Leonard and the mechanics of the scheme that the NBA chose not to impose the most severe player-specific remedy available to it.
Robertson may not have been Leonard’s intentional fall guy, but he became an effective buffer.
The Clippers took the full force of the punishment. Leonard kept his contract, avoided suspension and largely walked away with the damage contained.
