Los Angeles Clippers star Kawhi Leonard faces investigation by the NBA due to a sponsorship deal with a bankrupt green banking company.
However, this is not the only controversy that the superstar is dealing with now.
Ex-Esports contributor Pablo Torre exposed on his podcast, “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” on Thursday that Leonard had an undisclosed sponsorship worth millions of dollars with a company responsible for designing the Clippers’ videoboard located in the Intuit Dome.
The Daktronics Allegations
According to the podcast, Pablo Torre spoke to “an anonymous high-level source under contract for Intuit Dome” who said that the sponsorship “was 1,000% a way to circumvent the salary cap. It was funneling money from the Clippers through Daktronics back to Kawhi.”
Moreover, Pablo Torre referenced an anonymous former Clippers official who said that they were aware that Leonard had a sponsorship deal with Daktronics, the South Dakota-based company that created “The Halo Board,” which is the biggest double-sided halo display set up in the Intuit Dome, Los Angeles Clippers’ stadium in Inglewood, California, valued at $2 billion, which was opened in August 2024.
What’s at Stake for Los Angeles
The Clippers did not provide any statement regarding the issue on Thursday evening.
Although nothing is known about when the sponsorship deal with Daktronics started and what terms it included, a spokesperson of Daktronics stated that Kawhi Leonard does not have any active contract with the company.
Moreover, the spokesperson said, “I don’t know what the company wants to say, or can say, given the Wachtell investigation and all that,” referring to the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, which heads the investigation carried out by NBA into the sponsorship deal between Leonard and Aspiration, a company that had its own sponsorship with the Clippers in September 2021.
In mid-July, according to The Athletic, NBA investigators have been looking into “a previously unreported endorsement deal with another company.”
The investigation of the Clippers and Leonard has started in September after Torre’s podcasts exposed the documents that showed that Clippers owner Steve Ballmer invested $50 million in Aspiration through his personal LLC in September 2021.
At the same time, the Clippers signed 23-year deal with Aspiration worth $300 million and became the “first founding partner” of the Intuit Dome.
Six months later, Aspiration signed a deal with Leonard worth $28 million. According to an unnamed company’s employee, Leonard’s sponsorship with Aspiration was “to circumvent the salary cap.”
The Clippers have denied numerous times that they funnel money through Aspiration to pay Leonard.
Steve Ballmer has claimed that the Clippers have introduced Aspiration executives to Leonard’s representatives but after that point, they were not involved in the process anymore.
Moreover, he has lost all his investment in the company ($60 million), and was “flagrantly defrauded” by Aspiration, the co-founder of which Joseph Sanberg was sentenced to 14 years in prison in June for fraud against investors and lenders worth $248 million.
