New chapter in the ‘Kawhi scandal’: “It was 1000% a way to avoid the salary cap”

It has been almost a year since the journalist Pablo Torre revealed in his podcast ‘Pablo Torre Finds Out’ the alleged sponsorship contract of Kawhi Leonard with the company Aspirationone that was allegedly used to pay $28 million to the player ‘in B’ and thus avoid the NBA salary cap.

Although the investigation is still ongoing and awaiting a firm resolution that could punish both the player and the LA Clippers (and its owner Steve Ballmer), to this day evidence continues to appear that would reaffirm the theory that the Los Angeles franchise dodged the NBA salary system to pay Kawhi Leonard and thus retain him in his day in Los Angeles with a new contract.

The last chapter of this serial that seems to have no end was revealed precisely by the same journalist. This same Thursday, Pablo Torre revealed on his podcast that Kawhi had a “hidden” sponsorship deal with Daktronicscompany in charge of the design of the video scoreboards of the imposing Intuit Domethe imposing new home of the Clippers.

In the same program, Torre cited two sources, “an Intuit Dome contract worker” and a “former Clippers manager”which corroborated these suspicions. The first alleged that the company Daktronics had hired leonard with a fraudulent contract, to the point of “openly” joking about the matter with other Intuit Dome workers, calling it a “1000% a way to avoid the salary cap”.

“People from Daktronics and the Clippers organization itself had told me about this multi-million dollar agreement between Kawhi and the company. It is not a company for which you usually see a celebrity as an image. It did not come from them, but from the fact that, technically, the Clippers were financing him in a way, and that the money was funneled from the Clippers to Daktronics and from there back to Kawhi“, explained Pablo Torre who, at the same time, confirmed that the former Clippers manager ratified said agreement for the value of “several million dollars” with Daktronics.

While the NBA investigation continues pending a resolution, Kawhi Leonard’s future remains at a standstill. The forward was traded at the end of June back to the Toronto Raptors in exchange for Brandon Ingram and Gradey Dick, but the movement is paralyzed pending the results of the investigation and the final verdict of Adam Silver, which could punish both the player and the Clippers for violating the league’s salary rules.