Clippers Fined $30m, Stripped of Picks Over Leonard Deal

The NBA has fined the Los Angeles Clippers $30m and stripped the club of five first-round draft picks over the circumvention of the salary cap in Kawhi Leonard's 2019 contract, the harshest punishment ever handed down by the league. Owner Steve Ballmer has been suspended for a year from all NBA activities.

An independent investigation by the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz found what the league called systematic rule violations. The firm concluded that the Clippers had, on their own initiative, arranged off-court income for Leonard through four companies affiliated with the club, helped broker sponsorship deals for him, and covered personal expenses for the Forward and his representatives. The arrangements followed Leonard's four-year, $176.3m contract in 2019, at the time the maximum allowed under the league's collective agreement.

Gillian Zucker, the Clippers' president of business operations, has been suspended for a year. Lawrence Frank, the president of basketball operations, has been suspended for six months. The league has also ordered Leonard to repay $700m.

Commissioner Adam Silver set out the league's reasoning.

"The NBA's collectively bargained system for determining player compensation is a fundamental component of the basketball competition."

The case traces back to journalist Pablo Torre's reporting a year ago into the summer of 2019, when Leonard, fresh off winning the title with the Toronto Raptors, entered free agency and weighed offers from the Lakers and the Clippers before choosing the latter. The NBA operates a soft cap: clubs may exceed the base limit by paying a luxury tax, a route most teams use legitimately. The complaint against the Clippers was never about exceeding the cap by that method, by all accounts, but about how the extra money reached Leonard outside it.

Leonard, a two-time NBA champion in 2014 and 2019 and a two-time Finals MVP, previously played for the San Antonio Spurs and the Raptors before joining the Clippers.

Ballmer bought the Clippers for $2bn in 2014 from Donald Sterling, who had owned the club since paying $12.5m for it in 1981 and was forced out after a lifetime ban over racist remarks. Since then Ballmer has built the club a home of its own, the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, which opened in 2024 and gave the Clippers their first arena as tenants of no one since they left San Diego in 1984.

The scale of the sanctions may test how far the league is willing to go with an ownership class largely made up of billionaires for whom fines carry little practical sting; the suspensions of Ballmer, Zucker and Frank matter here as much as the money.