Ballmer confident Clippers adhered to salary cap

Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, addressing accusations that the franchise circumvented the NBA salary cap by securing and funding a no-show job for F Kawhi Leonard with the now-defunct company Aspiration, said today he is “quite confident” the team abided by league rules and continues to welcome an investigation.

Speaking at SBJ’s AXS DRIVE event in L.A., Ballmer implied that any deal Leonard struck with the eco-friendly company -- which has been reported as a four-year, $28M contract, plus $20M more in stock -- was done without the team’s knowledge.

“The important thing is our relationship with the company and the player’s relationship with the company were independent, which is important under the rules of the NBA,” Ballmer told SBJ Executive Editor Abe Madkour. “I feel quite confident in that, that we abided [by] the rules. And so I welcome the investigation that the NBA is doing. It’s a great way from our perspective to get the facts out there.

“…There’s nothing fun about being highlighted in this way. It’s a whole lot more fun to be highlighted for building a great arena, but this too shall pass. ... I feel very good about what we did, and we welcome the NBA taking a look at it and hopefully agreeing with us."

According to separate reports from podcaster Pablo Torre and The Athletic, Ballmer personally invested $60M into the company, the insinuation being that he did so to help the now-bankrupt Aspiration make its scheduled payments to Leonard. But Ballmer, who earlier said he was “conned” by the company, doubled down on that today.

“I was personally defrauded through our interactions with the company and some of the staff,” he said. “The fraud sort of extended broadly through that. We had many relationships with the company, sponsor, activation, was through carbon credits, a whole bunch of complicated stuff.”

Ballmer, asked a general question of how he’s evolved in his decade-plus as Clippers owner, described essentially more of a hands-off approach. “I’m involved, but really the people who run the business, run the business, and my job is to ask questions and challenge,” he said. “There’s a few big things like the arena. I micromanaged. Gillian [Zucker, team president] and I worked as partners, but nobody would call hands off with the arena. But when it comes to running our real business, ticketing, sponsorship, et cetera, I can be relatively hands-off.”

Other pertinent comments were related to the following:

• On the best way to improve revenue for a sports team: “Win a championship. You win a championship, it helps support revenue and sponsorship for many years. It’s not like, ‘Oh, we won one and then three years later we have a problem. You win a championship, that helps support not just the value of the team, but it also helps support revenue and sponsorship and ticketing revenue. So we’ve optimized digging a little bit more of a hole financially and hopefully setting ourselves up to win a championship.”
• On the burgeoning valuations of franchises: “The No. 1 headwind is finding buyers who can come up with all the money that it takes to buy teams. ... Let’s say you’re trying to raise, call it four and a half billion, and the lead persons can come up with a billion five, which it’s very tough to find people who’ve got a billion five that they can just put in a team. But then you have to find minority partners. ... It’s really hard to get there.”
• On hosting the All-Star Game at Intuit Dome this coming season: “I’m pretty pumped up about that. I think we’re probably the first arena that was awarded an All-Star Game before the building was built. ... I mean it’s a weird game because it’s not a home game for anybody. And so what can we do as part of the team with the NBA in terms of activating Intuit? I think there’s some pretty clever ideas.”
• On the biggest surprise of the first season at Intuit Dome: “The Wall, our 51 uninterrupted rows with the swell, our standing room only section. I wasn’t sure we’d really have that right in year one. I wasn’t sure because it takes a while to cultivate that kind of fan experience and energy. ... [But] if you look at the statistics, free throw shooting against the wall was the lowest by visiting teams, was the lowest percentage, of any arena in a meaningful way.”