NBA Drops Hammer on Clippers

0:00Basketball a game of Giants and Bears number 99 George Mican one of the greatest perhaps the most complete player the game is ever seen The Lakers Captain Elgin Bay Two seconds, one second, let's close it up Jerry West Bayer from the other side of the big club try Ford since it's a great sky hook up and go breakers well 90 got a medal just what I thought a hook shot at 12 Go You're keel fade away Yeah Five, six, three, three, two, one, James puts up the three Oh, it's gone Dr. John the Drive, step back, put it up, put it in Put my touch of a second remaining What's up, Laker Fans, you're listening to the Laker Film Room podcast I'm Pete and joined by, joined by Darren and yesterday sadly I did not finish my Walker Kessler video Because three of my passions in life all converged as the NBA drops the hammer on the Clippers $30 million fine loss of five graph picks Steve Bomber suspended for a year

1:04Kauai kind of slapped on the hand we'll talk to that talk about that later I think a $700,000 fine but it's the actual journalism being conducted Powerful people being held through account for just the egregious bullshit they try to pull You and I were going through the actual report last night and pulling segments that was and you were like This has more smoking guns than you'll somebody Sam and the third passion of mine is just bad things happening to the Clippers D And so what was your reaction to not an outcome that I expected at the very least very pleasantly surprised The more and more I thought about the league Instantly responding to that Nonsense ESPN report that essentially felt like it was written by Clippers PR staff where the Findings of the investigation show that basically making it sound like the Clippers didn't do anything The league can't prove anything and This is sort of the greasing of the wheels for what was coming, you know

2:06They said they found no evidence Yes, that's what the ESPN thinks that you know how balsy that is relative to what actually happened So the fact that the league Came out almost instantly Pete and was a psych the Report by ESPN is filled with so many errors. We're not even going to get into it right now And it's basically patently false it was a Rebuking to such an extent That I wondered if both a there was real evidence That b a punishment was coming and that c the league was so mad about it that they might actually up the ante even more to be like this bullshit Isn't gonna stand with us at all. You're not gonna try to frame this through a sort of aggressive Preemptive media strike to try to back foot us So was I surprised within the larger scope of how we hit followed the story the entire time which was

3:14It's taking so long and the Clippers being so denial heavy our view of Adam silver as a judge and jury Against one of the more powerful owners in the league How was that going to go out and honestly Pete? I think both of us had a healthy skepticism and cynicism around what this process might look like precisely because of our relationship to The general how do rich people police their cells? Right idea that exists in the world and so From that standpoint over the longer tail of this story I think yeah a little bit surprised, but the more recent last six to eight weeks of this Have felt like to me the league getting all their ducks in a row to potentially do something severe And boy was it severe essentially the largest penalty ever

4:16Given to a team for doing something like this and five first round picks and 30 million dollars the Joe Smith Deal which is the one most cited as the oh you got caught Trying to circumvent the salary cap that was five draft picks as well But the fine was not very big at all and David Stern ended up giving back two of the original five draft picks That he docked from the timber wolves but From the hammering of the clippers Pete and the report that walked out I forget the law firm's name but Their report was so And then there was this and then there was this and then there was this and the timeline stuff and then The clippers person said this to them and then internally they're saying this to each other And it was very well set up. It was the closing argument being provided to a jury

5:20To essentially sell their case and to me it's a slight fantastic now This is the one thing I don't think you can get away with two p or that you can let slide Yes, anyway You can't start to open up this Pandora's box of you know if you cover your tracks well enough or if you do it this way Then it'll all be fine. No, you have to drop the hammer for this exact scenario Absolutely, you can't have teams circumventing the salary cap like this the Pandora's box as you put it That you won't end up opening up just leads to chaos. I think around the league and it's important to have rules It's important to have not just rules, but have them actually be enforced and so I was pleasantly surprised to see them do that But in reading through the report and the details of it I was sort of gobsmacked by how sloppy they were and you made a good point that the other companies are going to be talking to themselves and all of that when ways that you can't cover it up all the way But there were so many points where they could have had plausible deniability

6:23Kauai shows up for one Indorsement thing right one of the points that they made is that all of a sudden these three companies in the span of six days during the middle of the pandemic Feels a real need to have Kauai Leonard be a sponsor for them when they've never had a celebrity endorser before or after it's like if they've even spaced that out over a Couple or a few months that looks a lot less and so it was remarkable to me in reading through that like how many times must this actually happen Where people aren't so sloppy and dumb about it that when it's this overt like you have to enforce it The other thing I was going to say Pete and this is where the Kauai side of things comes into it the Chief people who are made to look particularly bad in the report are Jillian Zucker Zucker And Lawrence Frank to a degree and then on the Kauai side it's Uncle Dennis Dennis Robertson and so to your point about the sloppiness

7:29Of things Uncle Dennis being a bit of a chaos agent within this to me is like the Tasmanian devil That the Clippers couldn't quite contain and so I think that if the Clippers were left to do this totally on their own Then maybe it would have been a little bit cleaner. But the hey Uncle Dennis is on our ass Where's that? And this was something that Pablo Torrey was bringing up in all of his reporting which is a name we should have brought up Oh, I really have a top of of all of this right he can't just be Reference his journalism with it this he what a pure surprise for this he won a moral award for this reporting He's been brilliant in terms of both as a content creator laying this out the way that he has But also too just doing the work and pouring through Thousands and ponds thousands of documents clearly Why is this important why is it important like look we can be petty laker fans I'm cackling my ass off it clipramus fortunes and all of that But there's another layer to this where it's like it was such a remarkable story of somebody actually

8:35Doing the job which is just one of the most important jobs There is how we get our information and the viability of that is so important versus Massive entity the biggest in sports being not only useless But like actively selling a bullshit narrative on the other side of things. Let's go to break air I want to get your answer to like why is the work that Pablo Torrey did so important in the first place Pete in the attention economy of the world The people who try to get your attention are consistently doing it in ways where They are both trying to erode Like systems and everything else while also Making it so that these ideas of like okay move on to the next thing move on to the next thing I call it kick-talk brain and I have it to a certain extent we all do as well And it's that idea of swipe swipe swipe swipe swipe scroll scroll scroll scroll and whatever you're dealing with

9:40Sits with you for a second and then the attention economy says move on to the next thing One of the reasons why I think what Pablo did was so important is that he created an environment where he decided I'm going to pay attention to something and then I'm going to dig Deeper and deeper and I'm going to continue to do the work and do the work in order to try to uncover a certain level of truth That exists within this and that path isn't always going to be linear It's not always going to be one where logically it takes me from a to b to c to d to e and on down the line Where each uncovering is something that feels logically connected Sometimes and I think that this is reflected in the report that the league's lawyers released as well Is that they explain the scope of this kept growing as we kept uncovering things and talking to more people and

10:41That work is critical to understand the full scope of something and I feel too often We get caught up just as citizens as people of the world not citizens of this country people of the world that We can too easily get caught up in whatever smaller version or morsel of something that people are trying to feed us in order to then just feed us something else the next time and That fuller buffet of ideas Is often never presented to people and one of the things that bothered me most over the course of this were all the people being like Ah just yeah get over it already. It's over. It's just like no you fucking morons There's actual shit going on here that someone's trying to work on and because your attention span or your level of I'm satisfied with this and nothing's going to happen anyway because that's been fulfilled for you

11:42You think other people should stop doing the actual work those were the sort of responses six months ago where I was just like y'all are All are fooled. It is dangerous. It's super dangerous. Yes. Gary's a great word. It's super dangerous Just because this phenomenon doesn't just exist in sports reporting But we'll keep it to that realm over the course of this plot and one thing that released it out to me that's also scary to me. D is Nobody else in Institutional media really came out with additional details So think about the timeline of how this goes down Pablo has his podcast and reveals that there's obviously something there did anybody else Pick up on details and be like and maybe I should talk to some former aspiration employees or maybe I should start digging into this and you were talking about the work and credit presenting this full case It's long slow and boring work. It's reading legal documents You and I were watching a video about the mark Walter situation and Eric Jackson who's I think a financial youtuber who bought all of the publicly available documents and all of that and that's really important work and

12:48the fact that Pablo unearthing it in the first place But nobody was like hey, this is a story that's worth reporting on I almost want to take the whole pod and we won't do this but in the direction of media and how Degraded it is to the actual purpose of what it is your job is not to be a stenographer for the people and access journalism Is that whole idea of you're going to provide us some access to The behind the scenes of whatever this is in exchange. You're going to get some favorable coverage I want to keep you on my good side and all of that and that's really the most generous Explanation billionaires and powerful people in general have been buying these who is one of the Steve bombers for first hires When he bought the clippers he hired Lee Jenkins Who's one of the more prominent writers right and I don't know who's being paid and who isn't I know Lee Jenkins was officially hired at least that's out there in the first place right It doesn't have the guys of I mean independent journalist who's pursuing the truth and all of that I know you're an employee of the team at least that's honest right

13:50But the most generous explanation is that this was Whole bunch of access journalism and like where did Bombergo running to the very moment this story broke He went to ESPN and he got on camera and Essentially what it seems like from the outcome of the Report that we just got from the league's investigation. He just told a bunch of lies Yeah, he went on TV and lie right to Ramona Shelburne's face right she's asking questions I went back and Looked it a podcast from the hoop collective that was released on September 5th So that's almost exactly a year ago today and it was Brian Winhorse and he had on Ramona Shelburne and Tim McMahon and Tim Bond temps were on and they brought on Ramona To talk about the interview that she had just done with Steve Balmer and when you were talking there about Who is added anything of value to this? Besides Pablo and the answer essentially being no one even tries

14:56The reporting and I don't want to cast aspersions at ESPN I don't know or their reporters the point I want to make though is that the framing of some of the reporting that was done from ESPN Side there were a couple of back-to-home stories for example the tenor and tone of those almost always felt like pushback against the narrative that public Tory was putting out there with a lot of the Information that he was reporting based off of sources and documents that he was digging through and so It put them on opposite sides in a way to me and that brings me to again the ESPN report that we referenced earlier in the pod where That very much read like a clipper staffer wrote it. Yes, and in the actual text of that article It said we reached out to NBA spokesperson Mike Bass on multiple occasions, but he never replied to this So how could you possibly write an article that says the NBA has not found any evidence on this if you're not talking to the NBA

15:59Either one of two other alternatives happened or three I should say is That you had other sources in the NBA who were giving you information of their side of the story and they were just dead wrong Possible I'm a little skeptical, but it's possible you had sources with walk-tell in company the law firm that was conducting the investigation I think that's fairly unlikely especially considering the risk that person would be under of sort of divulging that information that's not usually how those law firms will work is go yapping to a media company But possible or three you wrote that damn story with only one side of it how the hell does that get past editors? How the hell can you honestly go to print with the story saying the NBA has not found any evidence on this without getting the fucking NBA's version of the story in the first place the We're in the room idea of a story like that Where I'm sure they're getting it from multiple sources and people who are close to the situation But if all of those sources are representing a certain perspective and

17:00They're not sources on all sides of the story to your point. There's an NBA side of the story There's the investigative side of the story of the lawyers and I'm not saying that you got to uncritically believe whatever the NBA has to tell you Right, I'm just saying you got to get multiple sides of the story You can't just tell it from one perspective and this is where Even the part of the clippers response to the report of this was not what was represented to us so are you telling me that the People who are investigating you are not necessarily telling you every single step of what they're doing in order to try to Get more information or make you seem like you might be not telling the truth like okay unbelievable I'm sorry. I'm a brown person Pete. I've been in situations where people in power have not necessarily been telling me the truth In order to try to extract information from me that might put me or make me look worse, right?

18:03So sorry if I understand that these scenarios can play out a certain way But that part was the part that made me chuckle there are a bunch of parts of this that life Funny stuff that made me laugh the part that you referenced earlier About it's the middle of the pandemic and these companies are like hey You know what we had to get that sponsorship Quiet Leonard go. Yeah. Oh, let's get Kauai on board to do this stuff stuff like that was hilarious to me But when we come back I want to talk about something else that was pretty funny to me Bro can we invite Lawrence Frank to some of our meetings so that he could take vigorous notes for us When we have our little discussions and we're brainstorming ideas for future pods or whatever and then those go into one of our Braidsels and then totally escape as something else captures our braid It would be nice to have Lawrence Frank around to be able to say hey

19:05You remember you guys talked about x-y and z that would be a good subject for you down the line You have some respect areas. That's the 2019 2020 NBA executive of the year sir Very good. Don't take her this guy and it's not lost on repeat that as Steve ball mar gets a year suspension and Jillian zucker gets a year suspension and The rationale around zucker is this that she was obfuscating She was not always telling us the truth. She was not being forthcoming one quick note. She is the chief executive financial She's basically the lawn rozen or what Tim Harris was but for the for the clippers So that's the role did Frank face any punishment in this Yeah, he gets six months. Oh, oh see that Yeah, so he's six months suspension no pay and that six months takes him through The trade deadline and actually through I think even the waiver period I don't think he can come back until March right and so he would not be back until after essentially

20:10Most decision making what have to be done in terms of basketball operations for this season in terms of player movement and stuff like that but Balmer The sort of head of the snake in this regard the you were responsible for everything that happens in your organization He gets a year He's also been one of the more I didn't do anything. I didn't know anything I could have never known yada yada yada and then zucker who was Fendi devails Like hey, I'd like to introduce you to kawaii while other records show that knows he'd already been doing a lot of introducing Introducing the people introducing the terms of numbers of all kinds of stuff trying to cover her tracks in ways And then essentially seemingly based off of what this report says being Deceptive about all of that when talking to the investigators they get 12 months But when they talked about Lawrence Frank it was like nah, he pretty much cooperated

21:11And his story stayed consistent over the entire time that we spoke to him and he was even good enough to share his notes About conversations that he would have had and I don't know if you remember this But it was I think a month ago or six weeks ago that Lawrence Frank got an extension For the clippers and this was in the midst of the clippers essentially Not doing a full tear down But clearly over the last 12 months Starting to reevaluate the direction of their organization, right? They let Paul George walk They didn't seriously engage in kawaii extension talks, which is what he wanted They go and they trade James Hardin They go and they trade a pizza zubots they Do a lot of stuff to reshape the direction of their team and There was a thought that Lawrence Frank's job might be in jeopardy based off of the results the on the court results

22:13And instead he gets an extension Right in the midst of them being investigated and I remember there being buzz at the time around that of Lawrence Frank and an extension right when they're being Investigated where he might know some stuff is he essentially getting money that to talk It's dead not only is he talking Pete He's the one who's essentially getting the least amount of punishment Amongst all of the clippers people who are being Targeted as say no you were the masterminds behind all of this or at least you were the people who would have been Responsible and needed to know everything that was going down And so that's funny to me There's so many pieces of this where I've just I oh man the story of this can be told for who knows how long absolutely What do you make of kawaii getting essentially a slap on the wrist for this? I'm kind of of two minds on this where I do think it's more important

23:16To enforce this on the team side like the players trying to get the money that they can get but on another end of things I think that he's part of the NBA too You're in an agreement between the players association and the owners Him having an already prepared obviously written by a lawyer statement that accepted some degree of culpability Although it was all uncle Dennis and by the way, fuck you to anybody who says sorry for all the cussing But to anybody who's like kawaii had no idea this was going on like I saw shams On TV earlier that was like oh, yeah, this is all uncle Dennis. Kwai had no idea come on man This just follows that pattern of just utter bullshit just stop it Kwaii essentially skating I'm of two minds just like you I think it would be silly for us to just believe That he had no understanding of all of the money that was coming in and the reasons for it right and in the same way that we expect Steve Balmer to be aware of all of the things that are going on beneath him within his organization

24:20You should expect kawaii Leonard to be on top of what is being done in his name from a business perspective now I understand there are Stories littered across the history of the league and of professional sports in general of players being Taking advantage of financially by their representation But that's almost always in the reverse peat It's almost always of those players losing money It's of shoddy investments going out or financial advisors lining their own pockets at the expense of the player This is the opposite of that Kwaii was being enriched and on top of that the person who was supposedly doing all of this wasn't some random Financial advisor who is off the street. It's a family member It's his uncle and it's someone who very clearly was empowered to Operate from a business perspective on his behalf by kawaii and so he can't be

25:25Looked at as someone who had no idea again if it was like I'm being robbed here. I would take that more Like okay, I could see that maybe we're taking advantage of here But not when you've got 20 30 million dollars extra money that has nothing to do with your NBA salary hitting bank accounts That's a whole different deal and so it's dumb to think kawaii didn't have awareness of this But I said this online last night peat that the league Has a relationship with the owners through the board of governors and as people who bought in to this environment and there are certain rules that they have to follow the leagues relationship with the players while not adversarial By nature is one of there's a union and there's players and they have to deal with way more processes with them And what I think happened at least partially is that the league is like look man

26:30Whatever you knew Okay Take the hit on this We'll keep the hit light Your acknowledgement helps us in this other way and we're gonna go in this direction with this So they firm up their own case and at the same time peat they save themselves from having to go through a grievance process with the players union With the player himself and have this potentially extended on for who knows how long as they maybe have to go to arbitration And do all of this stuff where bomber can coast in the wake of Wise grievance process because bomber really doesn't have a grievance process here at all no And that's despite his best efforts. I'll be very surprised if he's able to make that happen So are you basically saying kawaii got a plea bargain That's basically what I'm saying. I think that he probably would have he basically is like behind the scenes I will admit to whatever Just by essentially accepting The punishment that you provide and now you get to go and make a big show of it in this other place

27:37But kawaii's david The take accountability for a lapsid judgment by the people In my inner circle. I think we're so stupid It's like that horse peat where it's drawn perfectly at the front and about time you get to the tail and looks like a three-year-old That was how kawaii's statement of accountability went first part. I take responsibility. Oh Great for my lapsing judgment. Okay lapsing judgment. That's a way of putting it. Yeah, that's one way for those in my inner circle So it's like oh shit, there's off the rails already like where'd we go What happened here one last thing day? I want to talk about is Adam silver. I want to wrap up on this I frankly thought Adam silver was kind of a chunk. I thought he was that substitute teacher that Had no control over the classroom and that you could do whatever you wanted and there was very little in the way of Actual authority there and I'm impressed I'm pleasantly surprised with the outcome of this. What do you think sort of the ramifications of all of this art?

28:39How do you view the Adam silver end of things? I want to hear from you first on this peat You say that you're impressed or happy in content with this talk me more about where your head is at because I know where you're going But I'd love to hear you explain a little bit more. It's what we touched on earlier about how just They're being rules in place think about an NBA basketball game Imagine if Luca got to call his own fouls. How many free throws would he shoot per game? If you don't enforce stuff like this or if you end up putting forth this idea of like well, you know We didn't have enough evidence and that was sort of what I expected was this idea of like the difference between kind of what you know and what you can prove And to their credit and I was one of the people complaining about this and so I was wrong But the length of time that they put toward it is very obvious in reading through the report that time was well used and they actually put together Case that I think if they try to go to arbitration or whatever legal records, which I think is very limited for ballmor on this I think it's going to be very difficult to kind of get out of this and

29:41The establishment of rules and everybody playing the game on the same playing field I think is super important both in sports and in society right one of the things people talking about Abillionaires are bad and all billionaires are terrible right wherever you fall on that spectrum It's way more to me about the violation of rules that those people often commit It's like if you can make a shitload of money Doing it by the book and doing it in an honest way that is sort of on the agreed upon rules of society and laws and things Like that that's awesome. Congratulations. Good for you. That's more my perspective of thing And so it's like I have this bigger view that extends out into just life in general of the importance of the rule of law And the importance of all of that that you need people that actually enforce it because just because a law or a rule is written down somewhere Doesn't mean that it's actually applied in practice and so him actually Following through with that and building the case and having that law from being able to have the resources available to Make that happen. I just think it's super important for the integrity of the league

30:43Integrities the word that I'm glad you said that at the end because I think that there are two cardinal sins when it comes to sports in general and one of them is sort of gambling and the sanctity of the results being determined Through fair play and everyone wanting to win right and the second part is the What are you doing in order to keep? The sort of fairness of player acquisition and the fairness of competition To be at the highest level right and I think that silver Basically saying earlier this season and last year with the oh no We saw players who were trying to basically mess with in-game statistics and prop bets in order to like enrich themselves or colleagues We're not standing for any of that. They're suspended forever Yep essentially and then in this case Being like salary cap circumvention is one of the cardinal sins of the league We can't have that and we're gonna lay the hammer down on that

31:46I think those are the areas where if you do not take a stand you no longer have a league So this is why to get back to what we talked about at the very top of the conversation The more you think about this if he were to let this go yes Then there's no coming back from it as a league and he's smart enough to understand that We use mentioned substitute teacher energy He's still gonna have that on a bunch of stuff whether it's how soft he might go on players or how much it's a player's league and certain things and letting owners get away with whatever We had this whole podcast about Adam Silver's NBA about The vetting of owners or the entertainment viewing quality of certain games and there's a bunch of stuff where I would like him to be better at and he's just not and he's not going to be I think expecting him to be this Fervent and strong on these other topics that's not gonna happen But in these cases I do feel like he's showing the backbone he needs to have in order to run this league because these are

32:55The biggest issues Pete if you can't guarantee the integrity of an individual basketball game because a player is betting his own unders Or if you can't guarantee that players aren't being paid under the table in order to get the most talent on your roster as possible You no longer have a league Yeah, you no longer have an organization that can be trusted by the fans And that's why some of the stuff I talked about earlier with some people being like oh just Forget it already nothing's gonna happen. Why are you even that's loser mentality to me right if anything Those same people needed to be like I want all the information and they need to be hit hard if you love the sport If you love the game you can't be so cynical that you're just like oh, okay, I'm over it already There's certain things where you have to take an actual stand Yep, and I'm glad if no one else is gonna do it. Pete the goddamn commissioner better. That's his job

33:58This is job and respect that I'm silver very impressed with how this got wrapped up pleasantly surprised So all right, man good talking about this we'll be back for one more tomorrow But until then you've been the son of Laker Filmroom podcast. We'll catch you guys next time The angel's gotta be unloading the kale the kale wants to turn these double-team just pass out about broken up by worthy If the magic worthy guy isn't as Ellie magic All right, it's over Lakeers when the game the game. Three seconds left. That next one will win it. It's on the right. That's on the right. 40-8 points. 16 revolts. We're going to drop the ties and NBA finals. Welcome. A lot of Laker fans. What's next? You're on for this. You're seeing something that's very rare indeed. A Laker to get MVP change. In Boston. A ballplay. Are you kidding me? No. Laker's looking to push Ryan spinning in the lane back for the saw in front of pass. And it's back to a three-point game. Go be Brian. Pick that back down.

34:59There's the move. Two are scored, listen. One-point, one-point. One-point. One-point. One-point. One-point. One-point. One-point. One-point. One-point. And one-point. One-point. One-point. One-point. One-point. One-point. One-point. One-point. One-point. One-point. One-point. One-point. One-point. One-point. Yes. Remember the little top-down trajectory. That is so the injury-coby. I mean, one is shot. I mean, you can't defend that. Are you kidding me? Two-point one, seconds remaining. Denver is a foul to give. Yo-kits. Trying to disrupt Rhonda. He puts it in. Here's Davis 4-3 in the win. Oh, it's gone. Anthony Davis has wanted for the Lakers. James again. Oh, he hits another one. LeBron James. Putting together a closing corner against the Nuggets. This historic 2020 NBA championship belongs to the Los Angeles Lakers. The Lakers conquered the bubble. And Banner number 17 will soon hang in the rafters. The Lakers conquered the bubble.

36:01And Banner number 17 will soon hang in the rafters. Banner number 17 will soon hang in the rafters.