The league hammered the Clippers with fines, suspensions and lost picks, yet the player at the center of the case walked away nearly untouched.
When the NBA finished its investigation into the Los Angeles Clippers, almost everyone involved paid a heavy price.
The organization lost five first-round picks and $30 million, owner Steve Ballmer was suspended for a year, and two of his top executives were suspended along with him.
The one person who came out of the scandal nearly untouched was the player the entire scheme was built around.
The reason forward Kawhi Leonard escaped says a lot about how the league's power actually works, and it is worth walking through, because the answer is less about innocence and more about leverage.
What the League Found
The NBA's investigation concluded in early September that the Clippers circumvented the salary cap by arranging off-court income for Leonard through four companies, including the now-bankrupt Aspiration, while also covering personal expenses for him and his representatives.
The findings named his business manager, Dennis Robertson, as the person making improper asks behind the scenes.
Ballmer got a one-year ban for knowingly facilitating the arrangements, and Pablo Torre has reported that his refusal to settle may have made the outcome worse than it needed to be.
Why Leonard Skated
Leonard's entire punishment was a required payment of $700,000 to the league, a small fraction of his $50.3 million salary.
There was no suspension and his contract was never voided, and ESPN's Shams Charania reported the reason plainly, saying the league lacked evidence strong enough to survive the fight the players union would have brought over a suspension or a torn-up deal.
In other words, the NBA could prove the team broke the rules, but proving the player deserved to lose his season or his money was a different and much harder case.
That gap between what everyone believes and what the league could prove is where this outcome lived, and the union's whole job is to make that gap as wide as possible.
On Monday the point became moot in Los Angeles anyway, as Leonard was traded to Toronto and the Clippers chose to build forward around forward Brandon Ingram and the players who remain.
It is a strange ending, because the punishment landed everywhere except on the name at the top of the story.
Silver Defends the Line He Drew
Commissioner Adam Silver addressed the outcome on Tuesday, telling reporters the league studied its own history before settling on the penalties and pointing to Minnesota's five-pick punishment from the Joe Smith era as the closest precedent, per the Associated Press.
"The ultimate goal in terms of these type of sanctions is to ensure that other teams don't engage in this type of behavior in the future," Silver said.
The system is built to punish the franchise that pays, not the star who benefits.
So the Clippers move on with a thinner future and hold on to the stability they still have, with forward Derrick Jones Jr. reportedly set to stick around, while Leonard starts over in Canada with a full paycheck and a clean schedule.
