Steve Ballmer is the richest owner in professional sports. He is accused of using a company connected to the Los Angeles Clippers to secretly pay Kawhi Leonard $28 million outside his NBA contract. Ballmer denies it. And after nearly a year of investigating, the NBA has reportedly found no proof that he did it.
What began as a story about one owner, one player and one suspicious green banking startup has become something much larger. It is a story about whether the NBA can actually enforce its own rules when the person accused of breaking them is wealthier and more powerful than almost anyone responsible for holding him accountable. And it is a story about whether Adam Silver — a commissioner employed by the league’s owners — can meaningfully investigate one of his most powerful bosses.
To answer that question, you have to understand the full arc of how we got here. That means going back to Kawhi Leonard’s uncle Dennis Robertson, and the list of demands he brought to team after team during the 2019 free agency process — demands that every team told him were illegal, that the NBA investigated and found no evidence of, and that Adam Silver himself called a cardinal sin of the NBA. And then Kawhi signed with the Clippers.
What journalist Pablo Torre found a year ago — and kept finding, piece by piece, for months — is one of the most compelling circumstantial cases in the history of sports investigative journalism. What the NBA’s eleven-month investigation found is something else entirely.
And what the league did with those findings tells you more about how professional sports actually works in this current era than anything that has happened in years.
What I’m Enjoying Right Now
The King of Comedy, directed by Martin Scorsese
Have been on a bit of a classic Scorsese kick recently, and revisited this underrated classic. The King of Comedy follows the disturbing exploits of aspiring stand-up comedian Rupert Pupkin, played by Robert DeNiro, who absolutely disappears into this role. This movie doesn’t go the way you expect at the beginning, and has aged incredibly in a day and age where everyone is chasing attention. What makes the film so unsettling — and so prescient — is that Rupert isn't delusional in the way movie villains usually are. He's just running the logic of fame culture to its natural conclusion. He watches enough television to understand that the difference between a nobody and a somebody is almost entirely a matter of exposure, and he is willing to do whatever it takes to get that exposure.
Scorsese and writer Paul Zimmerman never let you fully dismiss him, because the world the film depicts keeps rewarding the behavior it should be punishing. The movie came out in 1982 and essentially predicted reality television, parasocial celebrity culture, and the attention economy forty years before anyone had language for any of it. The ending still feels like a gut punch precisely because it refuses to be a cautionary tale.
Magnolia, by Gang of Youths
Gang of Youths released a new single recently and it pulled me back to a specific version of myself. 2019 feels like a different era at this point, and their music is somehow perfectly sealed inside it, the way certain albums become inseparable from the period of your life when you first found them. There is something about the scale of what they make, the way the songs build and crash and pull back, that feels genuinely out of step with how most music is constructed right now.
What keeps me coming back is Dave Le'aupepe's lyricism specifically. He writes with genuine literary ambition, with theology and grief and doubt and joy all tangled up together, without any of it feeling performed. He means it, and you can tell he means it. That sincerity is almost disarming in a cultural moment that treats earnestness as embarrassing.
Thanks for reading.
Joon