For almost a year, the Clippers had a simple way to explain the strangest part of Kawhi Leonard’s reported $28 million deal with Aspiration. It all came down to bad luck and bad actors.

Aspiration was a fraud. Steve Ballmer got duped. Leonard’s camp made that endorsement deal on their own, and whatever happened after that was between a player and a company that eventually collapsed under a $248 million fraud scheme.

It wasn’t a perfect explanation, and it asked you to accept a lot of coincidences, but it was at least plausible.

That's not really the case anymore.

According to new reporting from Pablo Torre, Leonard also had a separate, undisclosed multimillion-dollar deal with Daktronics — the company that built the massive Halo Board inside the Clippers’ Intuit Dome. And, much like the Aspiration deal, there’s no sign Leonard ever actually promoted the company or did any public work for it.

None of this, on its own, proves the Clippers broke salary-cap rules. The NBA has been investigating for nearly a year and hasn’t announced any violations.

But it does make the original explanation a lot harder to lean on.

One unusual sponsorship can be explained away. Two starts to look like a pattern.

The First Detour Came With A Paper Trail

Leonard signed a four-year, $176.3 million deal to stay with the Clippers in August of 2021. It was the max he could get at the time, even if a lot of people around the league thought he might go shorter or try to set himself up for one more big swing later.

About a month after that, Steve Ballmer’s personal LLC put $50 million into Aspiration. Then, not even two weeks later, the Clippers announced a 23-year partnership with the same company that was reportedly worth around $300 million.

Aspiration ended up as a founding partner of Intuit Dome and the jersey patch sponsor. The whole idea was that it would help Ballmer turn his shiny new arena into the most “sustainable” building in sports.

On paper, it all looked like a normal big-business relationship. Aspiration was valued at something like $2.3 billion at the time and had already pulled in celebrity names like Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr., and Drake. Ballmer wasn’t the only billionaire who bought into the idea that carbon credits and tree-planting could somehow turn into a massive, legit business.

But the Leonard piece of this story is where things start to feel… different.

In November 2021, a company called KL2 Aspire LLC was set up in California. A few months later, in April, that company signed a four-year endorsement deal with Aspiration worth $28 million.

The contract obtained by Pablo Torre Finds Out reportedly gave Leonard a lot of control over how any marketing would look and where it would show up. It also included a clause that let Aspiration walk away if Leonard ever stopped playing for the Clippers for any reason.

And that’s the part that makes you pause.

Endorsement deals can absolutely have all kinds of conditions — morality clauses, performance triggers, opt-outs, the whole toolbox. That’s normal. But when the entire agreement is basically tied to whether a player is still on one specific NBA team, it starts to drift right up against the exact kind of line the salary cap rules are supposed to keep from getting blurred.

What Was the Money For? 

The lack of any real advertising just made the whole thing feel even stranger.

Former Aspiration employees basically described Leonard’s deal as a “no-show job,” saying they couldn’t find any record of him doing the usual stuff you’d expect from a celebrity endorser — no appearances, no social posts, none of the typical marketing push they were running with other big-name partners. And yet, he was reportedly their highest-paid endorser by a pretty wide margin. He just… wasn’t visible in any of it.

There was supposedly an idea at one point. The Athletic later dug up concept art from a scrapped campaign that would’ve turned Leonard into something like Groot, tying his well-known love of comic books into Aspiration’s whole tree-planting, eco-friendly branding. It’s honestly kind of on-brand in a weird way. But it never actually got off the ground, and according to a former employee, the company was eventually told to just drop it altogether.

And then there’s the bankruptcy piece, which at least lines up with part of Leonard’s version of events. He says Aspiration still owes him more than $7 million. So whatever this was, it clearly wasn’t some clean, perfectly executed scheme to quietly funnel money to him — it didn’t even manage to pay him in full.

The Breadcrumbs Still Lead to the Clippers

The timing of the money going into Aspiration is still the part the Clippers haven’t really been able to explain.

On paper, it goes like this: the team sent Aspiration $3 million on April 1, 2022 as a prepayment for carbon credits. Three days later, they sent another $32.4 million — and that just so happened to be the same day Kawhi Leonard’s reported $28 million endorsement deal was signed.

Then in June, the Clippers told East West Bank they were planning to send nearly $21 million more for carbon credits and a reforestation project. Around the same time, another document showed Aspiration would deliver 400,000 carbon credits back to the Clippers on June 30 — which also lined up with the date Leonard’s first quarterly payment was due.

The Clippers’ stance has been pretty consistent: all of this was just normal business tied to building and operating Intuit Dome. Teams buy carbon credits. Owners invest in companies. Those companies can also sign endorsement deals with players.

And that’s all well and good. Individually, each piece fits within the rules. The problem is the “individually” part — because it’s hard not to wonder how separate any of it actually was.

That question gets even messier in December 2022. Aspiration was already struggling and missed a $1.75 million payment owed to Leonard. Around that same time, Clippers minority owner Dennis Wong invested $1.99 million into the company through another business. Nine days later, Aspiration suddenly paid Leonard exactly what they owed him.

That payment landed the same day the company laid off about 20 percent of their staff.

Then, in March 2023, Steve Ballmer reportedly put another $10 million into Aspiration, bringing his total investment to $60 million. He’s since said he lost every dollar of it.

And to be fair, Ballmer’s defense hasn’t really changed. He says Aspiration came to the Clippers asking for an introduction to Leonard’s camp — something teams are allowed to do for sponsors — and that he had no role in whatever deal came after that. He’s also said he was basically scammed, calling himself one of Joe Sanberg’s victims.

Sanberg, one of Aspiration’s co-founders, was later sentenced to 14 years in federal prison for fraud. So Ballmer losing $60 million here isn’t some made-up detail or convenient excuse — he really did get burned by a company that turned out to be built on lies.

But that’s also what makes this so messy. Aspiration was so chaotic and so fraudulent that it becomes genuinely hard to untangle what was intentional, what was sloppy, and what was just a company collapsing in real time. In that kind of environment, even legitimate transactions can start to look suspicious in hindsight.

And that’s exactly what the NBA has been trying to figure out for almost a year now.

Daktronics Completely Changes The Story

The second reported agreement cuts through a lot of the fog that made the Aspiration situation feel so weird in the first place.

Daktronics isn’t some flashy green-fintech startup with celebrity investors and sketchy balance sheets. It’s a South Dakota company that’s been around forever and basically makes the giant scoreboards and video boards you see in arenas.

And in this case, it wasn’t some random vendor either. The Clippers were a huge customer.

Back in June 2022, Daktronics announced that the Intuit Dome project helped push their yearly orders past $800 million for the first time. That Halo Board ended up being the centerpiece of Ballmer’s $2 billion arena — an acre of LED screens hanging over the court, more than 52,000 square feet of display, and a price tag somewhere around $100 million.

Daktronics doesn’t really operate in the world of celebrity endorsements. They’re not selling sneakers or energy drinks or trying to get fans to sign up for a credit card. They sell massive display systems to arenas, universities, and government agencies. Torre’s reporting didn’t find any real history of them using athletes as brand ambassadors, and former employees said that kind of marketing just doesn’t fit their business model.

So the idea that Kawhi Leonard somehow became the exception is… unusual, to say the least.

One contractor who worked on the Intuit Dome project told Torre that people inside both Daktronics and the Clippers openly talked about Leonard’s deal. That source went as far as calling it “1,000% salary-cap circumvention" and suggested the Clippers were effectively funneling money through Daktronics to get it to Leonard.

Separately, a former high-level Clippers executive also confirmed they were aware Leonard had a sponsorship arrangement with the company.

Those are obviously serious claims. But they’re still just that — claims from unnamed sources. There’s no public contract, no clear payment structure, and no paper trail showing Clippers money directly ending up in Leonard’s pocket through Daktronics.

A Strange Denial

Daktronics hasn’t really done much to clear things up. A crisis PR firm speaking for the company told Hunterbrook Media that Leonard isn’t under contract “right now,” which seems pretty intentionally vague. They also confirmed that Daktronics has been contacted by the outside law firm handling the NBA’s investigation.

When Hunterbrook kept asking for even a basic example of work Leonard did for Daktronics, they didn’t get one.

And look, silence isn’t proof of anything on its own. But it is one of those moments where a simple, straightforward answer would’ve gone a long way.

The Clippers can still frame the Aspiration situation as a classic “we got fooled by a con man” story — Ballmer invests, gets misled, the guy ends up in prison, end of chapter. That’s messy, but it’s at least a coherent explanation.

Daktronics is different. Now you’re talking about a separate multimillion-dollar deal tied to a different company that just so happens to be deeply involved in a major Clippers project.

And that’s where things start to shift. The NBA already had enough to sort through with the whole Aspiration mess. They're now potentially looking at two different cap-circumvention contracts at the same time.

And the NBA doesn’t need a smoking gun email that says, “let’s bypass the cap.” They can build a case from patterns and circumstances.

Toronto Wasn’t Going To Inherit A Mystery

The Daktronics report also makes the Raptors’ decision to pause the Kawhi Leonard trade look a lot less cautious and a lot more like common sense.

Toronto had already agreed in June to send Brandon Ingram, Gradey Dick, a mountain of draft picks (2031, 2033, swaps, the whole future bag) to the Clippers for Leonard, who was coming off a 28-point season at 35 years old. They knew the usual Kawhi risks — health, availability, and the $50.3 million left on his deal.

Then the NBA stepped in and told Toronto they’d also be inheriting whatever punishment comes out of the Clippers’ ongoing investigation into Leonard’s off-court deals.

At that point, the Raptors hit pause. And honestly, who can blame them? The league didn’t block anything — the Raptors just weren’t about to ship out half their future without knowing if the centerpiece of the deal might have his contract blown up.

And that’s the real issue. Under the CBA, the penalties can go way beyond fines. We’re talking draft picks getting stripped, contracts getting voided, money clawed back, and team officials potentially suspended. The financial hit barely matters to a $150 billion owner — losing picks or a star player does.

Right now, there’s no final ruling — just a lot of smoke, missing details, and two different business relationships pointing in the same direction.

Toronto, to their credit, saw that and decided not to gamble its entire future on it.

All stats courtesy of NBA.com.

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