The Green Line Breaks Down the Kawhi Leonard Story

For months basketball enthusiasts have been waiting to see if the NBA would produce any sort of investigation following a bombshell report, from independent sports journalist Pablo Torre on September 3rd, 2025, that alleged 2x Finals MVP and now 15-year veteran, Kawhi Leonard, was the recipient of at least $28 Million in a fraudulent endorsement deal with L.A. based company Aspire, Inc. Aspire was a company that dealt primarily in planting trees and distributing carbon tax credits to investors. Leonard is much beloved in the NBA for his roles on the Spurs and Raptors championship runs in the 2010s, and thus having an ambassador deal of this dollar value might not normally raise any eyebrows. That of course, comes with the assumption that Kawhi actually did any work to receive this money. All records indicate that he did not. He never appeared in any marketing campaigns, spoke about the company on a podcast, or even hugged a tree for the camera. Plenty of other NBA players and coaches dabble in a little fraud from time to time, so why should we care about this any more than Terry Rozier betting on himself? 

One of the most damning parts of this plot is that Aspire itself wasn’t really a shell company. If it was some sort of Clippers HQ-LLC meant to juggle their own money around, then maybe we could just chalk this part up to regular old wire fraud. However, any regular Clippers viewer would probably have heard that name before, seeing as in September 2021 Aspire became an official sponsor of the team. Aspire had real customers in L.A. and seemingly generated some revenue but, if someone, like Pablo Torre, were to follow the big dollar deposits, they might quickly find out that Clippers owner Steve Ballmer was funneling tens of millions of dollars into the company as investments. These investments are not to be conflated with the above comment about tax credits. It is then a bit strange that Aspire would take in money from Ballmer and then distribute it back to his NBA team in such short order. 

And the Securities Exchange Commission certainly did take note. As a brief aside, during this money exchange in 2021, Aspire began the process to become listed on the New York Stock Exchange. They had a projected evaluation of $2.3 Billion, and any regular reader or writer of this website would have been able to invest. Aspire spent $300 Million on the Clippers deal, after Ballmer (through associates) invested $315 Million to get in before the IPO. Note the similarity of those two numbers. At the start of 2024 Aspire would admit to the SEC that they had only fulfilled 1/3 of their pledge to plant 36 million trees, and then be in court for Chapter 7 bankruptcy an additional year after that. That could have been your hard earned money on the chopping block had the Celtics not won it all in 2024.

[no correlation there, just wanted to shout out Banner 18]

Torre, who states that his team spent 7 earlier months verifying reports, disclosed that Ballmer’s personal accounts had sent $50 Million to Aspire (after the $315 but before the Clippers deal was announced) as well. So plenty of points tying Ballmer to potential fraud, but there are no clear links to Kawhi Leonard in any of these dealings. That is until a former Aspire employee disclosed that they did in fact have Leonard on an endorsement payroll, and that they had been paying a shell company “KL2 Aspire LLC” and not Leonard directly. Readers may note that $50 Million is awfully close to double the $28 Million which Kawhi was reportedly paid under the table. 

What possible reason could Ballmer, and the Clippers, then have for paying Kawhi such a large sum under the table? Leonard’s four year 2021 extension paid him approximately $42 increasing to $50 Million each year, which is fairly linear based off of his $32 Million first year salary. (This jumped up from $23 Million on the Raptors, although that shouldn’t be suspicious seeing as he won a Chip there). $176 Million is also not an unreasonable amount of money to tie up for a player like Kawhi. For reference, JT and JB were paid about $25 to $54 Million a piece per year by the Celtics in that same period. The answer should then unfortunately hit quite close to home for 2026 Celtics fans.

The Clippers had a salary cap problem. They were floating about $45 Million a year to both Kawhi and Paul George (Hello newest Celtic), which put them firmly $30 Million past the first apron every year. For consecutive years of expenditure like that, the NBA will lock a team’s ability to trade picks, players, and salary which impacts the front office’s ability to produce a successful team. Thus if the Clippers wanted to entice Kawhi to stay, and be competitive, they would need to find a way to free up salary in order to pay other talents. Which is then how we end up with a quintessential L.A.-green finance-money laundering scheme.

Despite the clear ties between Ballmer, Aspire, and the Clippers, as laid out by both the SEC and Aspire’s own bankruptcy filings, the NBA didn’t seem concerned that these dealings were in any way spilling over into the league. Until Torre released his own findings of course, shortly after which the League announced that they had brought in an independent firm to review all the facts.

And then, the NBA said nothing, for a full calendar year, with only the Green Line Breakdown there to remind you that something strange was going on out West…

This article references information presented on Pablo Torre Finds Out: https://www.pablo.show/p/the-richest-owner-the-silent-superstar

Salary information taken from https://www.basketball-reference.com