The LA Clippers and Kawhi Leonard, who are currently under investigation for violations related to payments outside of the league’s salary cap, also received millions in a second questionable sponsorship deal, according to a report by the podcast “Pablo Torre Finds Out.”
The podcast, citing multiple anonymous sources inside the Clippers and the Intuit Dome project, reported a previously unknown deal with Daktronics, the company that manufactured the Intuit Dome’s Halo video screen and others in the sports world.
The Clippers have been under investigation by the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, with a focus on a $28 million endorsement deal given to Leonard by Aspiration, a former Clippers sponsor, since September. Clippers owner Steve Ballmer has maintained that he was defrauded by Aspiration and its co-founder, Joe Sanberg.
Sanburg was sentenced to 14 years for fraud this past June after he pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud.
Torre’s latest podcast, released Thursday night, cites multiple sources who said that Leonard was a Clippers spokesperson for Daktronics. It’s unclear when the contract began and ended. One anonymous source told Torre that the contract was for “millions of dollars.” The company has no other celebrity endorsement deals that have been made public.
When the podcast asked the company to confirm if Leonard had an endorsement deal, it referred them to a spokesperson for a crisis management firm who said, “My understanding is Daktronics doesn’t have a deal with Kawhi right now.” When asked for clarification, the spokesman said, “I don’t know what the company wants to say, or can say, given the Wachtell investigation and all that.
A spokesperson for the NBA didn’t respond to a request for comment on the latest allegations. The Clippers have not responded to a request for comment.
There’s been frustration in and around the NBA as the investigation into the Clippers and Leonard has dragged on since last fall. The results of that investigation are currently holding up a trade that would send Leonard from the Clippers back to Toronto — the team he left in free agency in 2019.
“The league did not pause the trade,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said of the Clippers-Raptors deal. “The parties to the trade made a decision not to go forward given that the investigation remained open, and any possible impact on Kawhi or his contract was yet to be known. And so, they chose not to live with that uncertainty, but that was well-known before the trade was proposed. I don’t think there was any reason for people to believe that the status of Kawhi Leonard would change merely because he was traded. The investigation needs to run its course.”
That summer, according to multiple league sources granted anonymity to discuss the situation, Leonard’s representatives, including his uncle Dennis Robertson, asked the Los Angeles Lakers for several impermissible benefits, including use of private aircraft, a home, guaranteed off-court earnings and even an ownership stake in the team.
The Lakers, according to sources, informed Leonard’s team that those requests violated the NBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement and amounted to salary cap circumvention.
Leonard and the Clippers have maintained their innocence throughout the investigation.
“I think we’re going to be in the clear,” Leonard said after the Clippers season. “It’s not stressing.”
“We’re on the right side of this,” Clippers president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank said in February.
Silver said earlier this summer that the investigation “can be wrapped up — and needs to be wrapped up — before next season.”
If the NBA finds there was a violation of the CBA, it can fine the Clippers millions of dollars, strip them of first-round picks, penalize Ballmer and even void Leonard’s contract.
According to Daktronics website, the company produces video boards for several NBA arenas, including in Phoenix, Charlotte, Milwaukee, Detroit, Memphis and Brooklyn. A search of “Kawhi Leonard” returned no results on the company’s website.
Law Murray and Mike Vorkunov contributed to this story.
