What's alleged here isn't proven yet, so start there. On Thursday, August 6, 2026, journalist Pablo Torre reported on his podcast "Pablo Torre Finds Out," working with Sam Koppelman of Hunterbrook Media, that Kawhi Leonard had an undisclosed sponsorship deal worth millions with Daktronics, the South Dakota company that built the giant halo videoboard inside the Clippers' Intuit Dome. One anonymous source told Torre's team the deal "was 1,000% a way to circumvent the salary cap," describing money that ran from the Clippers through Daktronics back to Leonard.
As of this writing, that's sourcing, not a paper trail. Every specific detail traces back to anonymous sources talking to one reporting operation. Daktronics didn't flatly deny a past relationship, but it denied a current one. A spokesperson said Leonard doesn't have an active contract with the company, then added, "I don't know what the company wants to say, or can say, given the Wachtell investigation and all that." NBC Sports reported the same phrasing: Daktronics doesn't have a deal with Kawhi right now. Neither the Clippers nor Leonard has issued a specific on-record response to the Daktronics claim. Keep the conditional where it belongs.
Now the argument. If this checks out the way the first case has been building, the NBA can't get away with a slap on the wrist.
Remember what the first case already involves. The Wachtell Lipton probe has run nearly 11 months, since Torre unearthed Leonard's secret endorsement deal with Aspiration, a now-defunct company whose co-founder was recently sentenced to 14 years in prison for defrauding investors. The mechanics reported there are specific: Steve Ballmer invested $50 million in Aspiration through his personal LLC in September 2021, the Clippers signed a $300 million deal with Aspiration that same month, and six months later Aspiration signed a $28 million endorsement deal with Leonard. Later reporting added a secret $20 million side deal, pushing the total toward $48 million. There's even a bankruptcy filing showing an entity that lists Leonard as manager, and that Aspiration still owes him $7 million.
The Clippers call all of it absurd. "Neither the Clippers nor Steve Ballmer circumvented the salary cap," the team wrote. Leonard, at media day in September 2025, said, "The NBA is going to do their job. None of us did ... wrongdoing and, yeah, that's it. We invite the investigation."
Fine. Then let the investigation do its job on this too. Here's the part I can't shake: the Aspiration story could be waved off as one bizarre, isolated arrangement with a company that later imploded. A second alleged pipeline, this time routed through a vendor that helped build the Clippers' own arena, turns a weird coincidence into a pattern. Torre's team flagged something worth sitting with: they couldn't find evidence Leonard actually did any endorsement work for Daktronics, a business-to-business company that doesn't historically pay celebrities to sell scoreboards. A sponsorship with no visible sponsoring is what circumvention looks like when it's dressed up as marketing.
