The Clippers Lost Five First-Round Picks and Thirty Million Dollars and Steve Ballmer Cannot Go Near the Team for a Year

The NBA announced on Wednesday that the Los Angeles Clippers will forfeit a first-round draft pick in each of the 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032 and 2033 drafts, pay a $30m fine, and lose their owner for a year, after an investigation found the club circumvented the salary cap in connection with Kawhi Leonard's 2022 signing.

Steve Ballmer is suspended for one year from all league and team activities. Gillian Zucker, the president of business operations, is suspended for a year without pay. Lawrence Frank, the president of basketball operations, is suspended for six months without pay. Dennis Robertson, Leonard's uncle and former business manager, is barred for five years from doing business with NBA teams on a player's behalf. Leonard himself was fined $700,000.

The investigation was run by the New York firm Wachtell Lipton, opened in September 2025 and reported on 2 September 2026. It began after the journalist Pablo Torre reported that Leonard had a $28m endorsement deal signed in 2022 with the green-banking firm Aspiration, which separately held a 23-year, $300m sponsorship agreement with the Clippers. The league found the club initiated off-court income for Leonard with four companies doing business with the team: Aspiration Partners, Boingo Wireless, Daktronics and Lockton Insurance.

Aspiration went bankrupt. Its co-founder Joseph Sanberg was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to defrauding investors and lenders of at least $248m.

The league's statement described the Clippers as a prior offender of the cap circumvention rules. Adam Silver said he was deeply disappointed by what he called flagrant violations and by the institutional and leadership failures that led to them. The Clippers said they vehemently reject the findings and will seek arbitration.

Cap circumvention cases are rare, and the league treats side payments as an attack on the collectively bargained system rather than as a technical breach, which is why the penalty is structured to remove draft assets across five separate years rather than take money once. A Clippers trade sending Leonard to Toronto, agreed earlier in the summer, had been on hold pending the outcome and can now proceed. Leonard won a title and the Finals MVP award with the Raptors in 2019.