Steve Ballmer wrote a $400 million check to James Dolan just to get him out of the way.
Not a loan. Not a structured deal. A check. Four hundred million dollars — to clear a regulatory issue around arena proximity, because Ballmer wanted to build the Intuit Dome and Dolan owned a competing arena in Inglewood and the NBA's rules said two buildings couldn't sit that close together. Ballmer just paid him to leave. Four hundred million dollars. Gone. Problem solved.
That's the context Jabari Young put on the table this week, and it's the detail that changes everything about the Kawhi Leonard story. Because the same guy who writes a $400 million check without blinking — who tears out $13 sneaker stalls and replaces them with 14 because his players like shoes and he wants them comfortable — that same guy is now sitting in front of cameras saying he didn't know about a $28 million endorsement deal routed through an LLC tied to Kawhi Leonard's family.
Jabari said it straight: I don't believe him.
Neither do I.
What this story is actually about
The public framing is: did Kawhi Leonard cheat? Did his uncle Dennis set up a sweetheart deal with Clippers ownership to circumvent the salary cap? Did anyone know? Did everyone know?
Those are real questions. The NBA will answer them eventually, one way or another. But that's not the argument worth making here.
The argument worth making is this: the Kawhi situation is what happens when a league builds a system of rules that everyone inside it has already decided are negotiable — and then acts surprised when someone negotiates them.
Jabari walked me through the timeline of black eyes the NBA is sitting with right now. The referee gambling scandal. The Malice at the Palace. Donald Sterling. The Luka Dončić trade that sent him to the Lakers the same week Dallas somehow landed the first overall pick. And now this. People already think the NBA draft is a scam. He's right. There's a cumulative credibility problem that doesn't get solved by suspending one uncle.
The deeper issue isn't that someone tried to hide $28 million in an LLC. It's that the league has slowly allowed the space between "against the rules" and "illegal" to become a place where smart people operate comfortably. Owners with gambling company investments. Collectives paying NIL money that looks nothing like the amateur model the rules were built around. Cap structures that every front office attorney is probing for edges. The Kawhi deal — if it happened the way it appears — isn't an anomaly. It's an extension of a logic that's been running for years.
Someone put $28 million into K2L LLC. That stands for Kawhi Leonard. Nobody made that abbreviation accidentally.
What Ballmer knew, and why it matters
I've been around Steve Ballmer. He invited me through the Intuit Dome while it was still under construction — walking me through every detail, explaining why he was spending extra millions just to add one sneaker stall to the players' locker room. The guy is not someone who loses track of $28 million. He is not someone who gets conned. You do not build a $400 million check-writing capacity by losing track of where checks are going.
Jabari's read: Ballmer was asked point-blank during his interview whether Kawhi's camp ever asked for anything. His answer was not no. His answer was they know the rules, and if they didn't know them, we remind ourselves. That's a lawyer's answer. That's the answer of someone who has been told very specifically what not to say.
The man ran Microsoft alongside Bill Gates. He is not in the habit of being surprised by his own transactions.
What this creates for the NBA is a problem that goes well beyond the Clippers. If ownership at that level was in the room — or adjacent to the room — when this deal got structured, then the penalty framework has to reach ownership. Jabari's position: you can't fine Ballmer. Money is not a deterrent when you are a top-ten richest person on earth. You ban him from games. You take away the thing that actually matters to him, which is being present for the thing he spent two billion dollars to buy. The Saints had to do it. The head coach sat for a year. The franchise felt it. That's the version that changes behavior.
Otherwise the math is simple: if the penalty for cheating is a fine you can absorb in a quarterly rounding error, cheating is just a cost of doing business.
Where athletes lose the thread
Here's the piece that keeps me thinking, and it's the piece Jabari and I got into directly.
I've read contracts my entire career. Not because my attorneys told me to — because I wanted to understand what I was signing. When I was recently offered a three-year deal with a media company, I read all 15 pages. The data protection clause. The termination terms. All of it. Not to catch anyone doing anything wrong — to know what I was agreeing to. Because if I don't know, I can't act. I can't protect myself. I can't make good decisions. My attorneys and accountants are resources. They are not substitutes for my own understanding.
The Kawhi situation, whatever actually happened, is what the opposite of that looks like. Somebody — maybe Kawhi, maybe his uncle, maybe both, maybe neither — didn't read the terms of the sport they were playing. Or they read them and decided those terms applied to other people. Either way, the outcome is the same: an investigation, a league with a credibility problem, and a player whose silence is the only smart move he has left.
I don't know too many people who would turn down $28 million. Jabari said it, and I agreed with him — that's not some small thing. Penny wise, pound foolish is a real dynamic when someone is handing you eight figures and telling you there's nothing to do for it. The number is seductive. The rounding on your existing contract makes it feel like found money.
But there's a version of this that's actually clean, and I described it on the show: what if an owner — genuinely, as a function of relationship and shared business interest — invites a cornerstone player into an investment alongside him? When I was with the Miami Dolphins, Steven Ross made me the highest-paid defensive player in the league. What if I'd earned the opportunity to invest alongside him in something real? Alongside sovereign wealth funds in a Hudson Yards-type deal? That's not a favor. That's an owner recognizing that the relationship has value beyond the uniform, and extending it appropriately. That's the Magic Johnson model — build real relationships with the suite holders and courtside owners, be excellent at what you do, watch the business doors open as a natural consequence. That's not circumventing anything. That's leverage applied legally.
The difference between that and the Kawhi deal, if the allegations are accurate, is the difference between access and arrangement. One is a byproduct of excellence. The other is a payment in disguise.
PULL QUOTE: "You cannot have a team on Adam Silver's watch that's being accused of cheating. Somebody has to take the fall." — Jabari Young
NIL made this worse before it made it better
The conversation ended somewhere I didn't expect it to go, and it's the part I can't stop thinking about.
I asked Jabari about NIL — about the wild west that college sports has become, where backroom deals are standard, where collectives operate in a gray zone that no one has fully mapped yet, where the line between legitimate compensation and under-the-table recruiting inducement is drawn differently by every school's attorneys.
His answer, and mine: the players coming into professional leagues right now have been swimming in that environment since they were 18. They have been watching coaches, boosters, agents, and administrators negotiate the space between the rules and the reality. They have been participants in a system where knowing how to work around the structure is not a scandal — it's a skill. It's how you get to the next level.
When that player gets to the NBA or the NFL and someone offers them an arrangement that looks structurally similar to what they've been doing their entire amateur career — just with more zeros — are they going to see a bright ethical line? Or are they going to see a familiar transaction?
That's not an excuse. It's a diagnosis. The leagues are going to spend the next decade dealing with the downstream effects of an era when the rules around player compensation were systematically broken at the college level with everyone watching and no one meaningfully stopping it. Kawhi's situation, if it proves out, is early evidence of what that looks like in the pros.
What actually needs to happen
Three things, in order, that would actually address what this episode is pointing at:
- The penalty has to be calibrated to the person receiving it. A $5 million fine means nothing to Steve Ballmer. A game suspension means nothing to a team. The only penalties that change behavior are the ones that take away something the person actually values — Ballmer's presence at games, an uncle's league access, an LLC's legal status. If the NBA wants this to stop, it has to cost something real. The Saints model works. The New England Patriots model — Brady suspended, franchise under scrutiny, everyone watching — works. You don't discourage rule-breaking by making the fine smaller than the gain.
- Kawhi needs a clean team around him, not a family team. I don't say this to diminish family. I say it because the Ohtani parallel is real: when the person managing your affairs is someone you can't evaluate objectively, you lose the ability to know what's being done in your name. It doesn't mean family is corrupt. It means family operates under a different set of incentives than a fiduciary does, and those incentives don't always run in your direction. Get the attorneys. Get the accountants. Get the people whose entire professional reputation depends on keeping you clean — and who will tell you no when no is the right answer.
- Stop pretending the gray zone doesn't exist, and start drawing the line clearly. The gambling company investments. The NIL collectives. The cap structure gamesmanship. All of it lives in a space the leagues have implicitly tolerated because the money is good and the legal liability is someone else's problem. That space is getting bigger. Kawhi's LLC is not the last version of this story. The leagues have to decide whether the rules mean something — and demonstrate it with enforcement that actually stings — or accept that everyone smart enough to find the edge is going to use it.
The league that gets this right first will be the one that takes the integrity of its rules seriously before it has to. The one that waits will keep finding new ways to do the same press conference.
Kawhi, for his part, is going to say nothing. That's the right call. You keep your mouth shut, let the process work, and it goes away. Whether he knew or didn't know, whether Dennis acted alone or didn't — none of that changes by talking about it. The silence is the only smart move left.
But someone in that building made a choice. And the NBA's only real question now is whether the consequences make that choice look as stupid as it actually was.