Someone is lying

#TeamPablo

Marc Stein noted that, now that they’ve digested all of Pablo Torre’s reporting on the Clippers and Kawhi Leonard, many sources around the NBA see Steve Ballmer and the Clippers as “guilty until they are proven innocent.” Sounds bad, right?

But I wonder if instead we got here through a masterful presentation of extensive damning evidence and testimony. To me that makes it more like “proven guilty unless proven otherwise, which’ll be tough.”

Meanwhile, it’s an open question if we will get to the bottom of it, or if we already got to the bottom of it. History proves that more experts doing more work doesn’t always mean more truth.

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“It's really important to me,” Steve Ballmer told ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne, “to communicate to the NBA ecosystem, but particularly our Clipper fans, that we've been on the up and up since the day I bought the team. And you know the circumstances were definitely tough, we've really emphasized doing things the right way, doing things the right way, whether it's the way we treat our fans, our players, our staff, the rules: do things the right way. And I want our fans to really understand that they've aligned themselves, that they support an organization that does things the right way. And that's, that's, that's fundamental. We welcome the league investigation. We have nothing to hide.”

In 2019, the Athletic had a killer story about the Houston Astros stealing signs. “Regarding the story posted by The Athletic earlier today, the Houston Astros organization has begun an investigation in cooperation with Major League Baseball,” they said at the time. Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow had more to add:

I'm hopeful that we'll find out exactly what happened and we'll address if there's something to be addressed and we can move on. The reason we won the World Series in 2017 is Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman, Justin Verlander, and a lot of great players and they do things the right way and we as an organization, that's what we aspire to do as well …

Teams are competing with one another and everybody is trying to find an edge. But we all have to follow the rules and the rules are set by Major League Baseball. We all follow them, we agree to follow them and if you don't there's ramifications to that. We want to follow the rules and we want to compete and win and that's what every other club does as well.

Sounds like Ballmer, right? After the investigation, Luhnow was fired.

The question at the heart of the matter is: who has the right to determine what’s true? The subtext of Ballmer’s statement is: Not Pablo Torre. The subtext of Luhnow’s statement is: Not the Athletic. Some other body would get to the bottom of it. We are all truth seekers, they want you to believe, and the real investigation is only just beginning.

Maybe, maybe not. Big tobacco wrote the playbook for modern public relations crises. Harvard historian of medicine Allan M. Brandt narrates the approach in a 2012 article in the American Journal of Public Health.

By the early 1950s, the emerging science on tobacco's harms documented in the elite peer-reviewed literature, especially the causal linkage to lung cancer, threatened to undo more than a half century of unprecedented corporate success. With considerable anxiety and rancor within the tobacco industry, the industry's highly competitive CEOs came together in December 1953 at the Plaza Hotel in New York City to map a strategy. They realized that the threat they now faced was unprecedented and would require new, collaborative approaches and expertise. Not surprisingly, given their history, they turned again to the field of public relations that had served them so well in the past. They called upon John W. Hill, the president of the nation's leading public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton. …

Hill understood that simply denying emerging scientific facts would be a losing game. This would not only smack of self-interest but also ally the companies with ignorance in an age of technological and scientific hegemony. So he proposed seizing and controlling science rather than avoiding it. If science posed the principal—even terminal—threat to the industry, Hill advised that the companies should now associate themselves as great supporters of science. The companies, in his view, should embrace a sophisticated scientific discourse; they should demand more science, not less.

Of critical importance, Hill argued, they should declare the positive value of scientific skepticism of science itself. Knowledge, Hill understood, was hard won and uncertain, and there would always be skeptics. What better strategy than to identify, solicit, support, and amplify the views of skeptics of the causal relationship between smoking and disease? Moreover, the liberal disbursement of tobacco industry research funding to academic scientists could draw new skeptics into the fold. The goal, according to Hill, would be to build and broadcast a major scientific controversy. The public must get the message that the issue of the health effects of smoking remains an open question. Doubt, uncertainty, and the truism that there is more to know would become the industry's collective new mantra.

“Seizing and controlling science” is not good for the truth. How many millions died of lung cancer in the interim? 41 percent of Americans smoked in 1944. Scientists published solid findings about smoking and lung cancer in 1953. Three decades later, 38 percent of Americans still smoked. Imagine being an honorable, straight-shooting cancer researcher, and seeing kids born after 1953 growing up to smoke at similar rates to their parents while the government did little but tinker with the language on the package. After a false start in 1996, it took until 2009 for the Food and Drug Administration to meaningfully regulate tobacco.

There was no need for the tobacco companies to refute the science of 1953, it was enough to appear to be seeking truth while fuzzing up the narrative.

This approach has been oft-replicated.

Guess which environmentalist said this:

By training, I’m an engineer, which in many ways is how I still see myself – as someone who solves problems. And in my personal life, I’m a father and grandfather – who cares about his family, their quality of life, and their futures. Which means, I care very much about our environment and the health of our planet. … Climate change is real, human activity plays a major role, and, it is one of the major problems facing the world today – the need to address the very real threat of climate change.

That’s the head of ExxonMobil. (Also, take a look at Saudi Arabia’s committment to a greener future.)

In other words, we’re not all confused today because we're stupid or distracted playing Wordle. (Or not just that, anyway.) We’re confused because people spend a fortune trying to fuzz up our thinking.

In my corner of the world, NBA sports media, there are all kinds of people in all kinds of makeup willing to play the role of Caesar Flickerman from the Hunger Games, chanting wonderful! as the powers that be do their dastardly things. (There was a moment in Ballmer’s interview, as he pleaded his innocence saying “they conned me!” he was interrupted by his interviewer saying “you’re one of the richest men in America.” I’m not making that up. Wonderful!)

Another thought: if Steve Ballmer made 50k a year, is there any chance he’d be wearing a lavalier microphone, on a digital set with his name in letters a yard high, with a long chunk of airtime?

Similarly, billionaire Mark Cuban has gotten himself some airtime. He argues that he, Cuban, knew Aspiration was a fraud from the first email he ever received. But curiously he also later argues that it makes sense that Ballmer would not have known that Aspiration was a fraud.

And then there’s Cuban’s core argument: Aspiration benefitted from Kawhi being a Clipper more than the Clippers benefitted from Kawhi being a Clipper. OK, whatever Mark. (One of the top comments on that episode came from Sean Murphy: “I found this episode to be incredibly infuriating. Mark Cuban just was going off of vibes.”) Billionaires get to be heard, whether they have anything important to say or not.

Instead of billionaire bloviating I’m hungry for the Katniss Everdeen vibe of telling it like it is, even when that pisses people off. We are desperate for real media truth telling in the NBA.

Until Pablo Torre took on Steve Ballmer. After Ballmer’s appearance in ESPN, Pablo rolled out bank statements showing payments from here to there, with narration from not one but two members of the Aspiration finance department.

I literally pumped my fist in the air. It’s good journalism.

Let’s recall how Donald Sterling got in trouble. A tape emerged of Sterling saying racist and sexist things. In the aftermath, we learned what the procedure was: Adam Silver wanted to know, before he took any action, if that was really Sterling’s voice. David Anders of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz rushed into an investigation, and interviewed Sterling’s girlfriend, V. Stiviano, and another person who had been present when the recording was made. Both agreed the recording was authentic, which Anders told Silver, and then Silver leapt into action banning Sterling from the NBA.

Here Pablo and his team did analogous work. The financial records sure appear to be evidence of money moving from Clippers sources to Aspiration to Kawhi. Did people in the room see it that way? Yes, two of them, people in the very middle of moving that money, saw it as an infraction of the CBA.

I'm a believer that we need to root for beautiful and honest truth telling. We need 100 times more than we have, across all parts of society. The NBA is essentially an organization of billionaires, who are Adam Silver’s bosses.

When stories emerge implicating powerful people, often what happens is that people nick up that narrative while pretending to be on the real hunt for truth. Cuban made a first shoddy attempt at that. It won’t convince me.

I hate to bring up Trump, but he’s a handy example. Now public is a page of Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book that appears to have been created by Trump.

The reaction has been to rough up that narrative with little notes–is that his signature? Does he draw? Does he use words like enigma?

The equivalent, in this Ballmer story, would be to ask questions like “yeah, but do you have a document proving Ballmer knew about this in real time?” (If that’s really the standard, and it isn’t, then you’d be telling rule breakers that if they don’t memorialize their crimes in documents, they’re at no risk.)

In the Trump case, it’s not even controversial to say that Trump and Epstein were friends in 2003. One document that proves it: his name comes up on other pages of the birthday book, and they’re together in that era on video, in photos, at parties, and so on. It makes perfect sense that Jeffrey Epstein’s friend Donald Trump would contribute to a book of Jeffrey Epstein’s friends.

Maybe he didn’t. I’m open minded. I wasn’t there, I have no idea what happened. All I can do is read the tea leaves.

Please, give me some proper effin’ tea leaves. If Donald Trump didn’t contribute to that book, when we know Ghislaine Maxwell was aggressive in courting contributions, why didn’t he? What did he say to refuse Ghislaine’s request? How did that go down? Don’t tell me what didn’t happen, tell me what did.

Until then, I’m going to assume that Trump page in the book is real.

Which is exactly how I feel about the scheme outlined by Pablo and his team.

Steve Ballmer adores the game so deeply that, I witnessed myself, he watched the whole boring NBA draft combine in person, sitting alone in an empty section of Chicago’s Wintrust Arena. He paid for a fancy stadium in an expensive city. He has the decency to pay massive amounts of luxury tax, without even being so selfish as to take a Finals spot. Clippers employees love him.

Ballmer would be due a fair hearing even if he were a total jerk.

But strange things have happened and they need explaining.

Many teams, witnessing the Raptors team win the 2019 title with a perfect blend of veterans, Kawhi in his prime, and young stars like OG Anunoby and Pascal Siakam, came away feeling it would take a desperate, rule breaking level of all-in to get Kawhi.

Kawhi was unofficially represented by Uncle Dennis, who made news for demanding extraordinary extracurricular benefits for Kawhi. Then the Clippers got him.

And now Pablo and his team have unearthed documents of payments from Ballmer and his college roommate Dennis Wong to Aspiration that correlate almost perfectly with amounts paid from Aspiration to Kawhi for … doing nothing at all.

Pablo has two sources on tape from the upper reaches of Aspiration’s finance department to explain that they absolutely saw those transactions as efforts to circumvent the salary cap. These people lived in the middle of Aspiration’s money movements. They talked to Kawhi’s Uncle Dennis. They understood how insane it was that Ballmer’s college roommate and business partner Dennis Wong wrote a $2 million check to Aspiration at the very time they were laying off a massive chunk of the workforce on their way to going out of business. And they have documents showing that, even as the company went under, they made certain to pay Kawhi $1.75 million for doing nothing whatsoever.

Adam Silver’s approach is to introduce some of highest-paid lawyers in the history of the world. (Wachtell recently submitted a $90 million bill to Twitter.) I just want to make this clear now: when the Wachtell report comes out, if it merely nitpicks or confuses Pablo’s version of events, rather than telling a better one, then I will assume Ballmer intentionally paid Kawhi to circumvent the salary cap.

Convincing me otherwise will need the story that completely encompasses the facts that Pablo has laid out and puts them into a more accurate context. Why did all of this money move in these ways? Are there people involved in getting money from Ballmer to Aspiration to Kawhi who didn’t think it was about cap circumvention? Why did Ballmer give Aspiration so much money? Why did Oaktree? Why did Dennis Wong? Who at Aspiration insisted on paying Kawhi so much money to do nothing? Was Ballmer lying his face off on ESPN?

And, importantly: Why did Kawhi join the Clippers to begin with? Did they get requests to make payments outside of the rules? How did the Clippers deal with those requests?

Is there evidence of people around Kawhi getting payments from the Clippers or anyone involved with the Clippers?

It matters. I could argue that the deal between Kawhi Leonard and Steve Ballmer set basketball back, because it broke up the Raptors when they were next. Now we know that Kyle Lowry, Siakam, Anunoby, Kawhi, and Marc Gasol formed the kind of defense that would change NBA defense forever. That roster had Fred VanVleet, Norman Powell, Jonas Valanciunas, Danny Green, Serge Ibaka; they could have been a dynasty. (Even without Kawhi, the Raptors were 46-18 when the league shut down because of the pandemic the following season.)

Masai Ujiri worked hard to recruit Kawhi; by the end his pitch was essentially: We just won a title. We have a championship team and we’re going to run it back. Nobody else can give you that.

We can think of players like playing cards. Kawhi was an ace, in Toronto he played as part of a royal flush. As a Clipper he was teamed up with a jack, a seven, a four and a three–in that lineup it barely matters if you’re an ace or a nine.

Those Raptors were groundbreaking, advancing, changing basketball, redefining defense. It was beautiful. If the money was the same, would Kawhi have really left that?

We know the Clippers did everything they could to get Kawhi. At the 11th hour, Kawhi wanted to play with Paul George. Ballmer wanted to create a dynasty, so he made the deal. But he overpaid so wildly that he created a dynasty on the other end of the transaction in Oklahoma, instead of Los Angeles.

In Kawhi’s one season in Toronto, the Raptors won sixteen playoff games. In Kawhi’s six seasons in Los Angeles, the Clippers have won eleven … total. It’s a crime against the game. Quite possibly the whole country of Canada would be head over heels in love with the sport of basketball if the NBA had done a better job of policing its own CBA.

We have a case of the richest, and on a good day, the best owner in sports, looking like he broke the rules. I saw Ethan Strauss saying he asked around, and people generally thought Ballmer was doing things the right way, and it wouldn't be like him to commit a crime against the collective bargaining agreement in this manner.

Yup. The question is: was this an exception?

The crime doesn’t sound very slick. Almost like first-time criminals would do it. The business entities that sent and received these funds have intuitive names that are easily traced to Kawhi Leonard and Dennis Wong. It would have been a cinch to add one more step and have a lawyer becoming a registered agent on some Delaware corporation that was otherwise untraceable.

And in that scenario, the scheme would have been much more difficult to expose! But instead, not even blindly pro-Ballmer Mark Cuban disputes the payments happened. It makes sense, to me, that this might have been a special case, Ballmer’s all-in move.

All sorts of people at Aspiration knew about it, say Pablo’s sources, which was one rookie move. And another was that Aspiration went bankrupt, which exposed all these records to the public, especially Pablo Torre. So, yeah, bad job.

Another thing to worry about is the culture of basketball. Billionaires have led the sport for a long time, and it’s corrupt. So corrupt that retired player Channing Frye asked Pablo, a journalist, why he was snitching. And then his podcast partner Richard Jefferson clarified “The reporter's job is to snitch. Our job is to keep it quiet, right?”

Our job is to keep it quiet. That’s two NBA lifers being honest about NBA business as usual.

Adam Silver says he has hired “the big guns” from the fancy law firm Wachtell, Rosen, Lipton & Katz to get to the bottom of it. We’ll see. Big-time law firms conducting sports investigations, over my time in this business, tend to miss things.

Wachtell’s Larry Pedowitz produced the NBA’s investigation on referee gambling, and emerged with a milquetoast report that somehow did not assess that Donaghy had fixed games. The juicy particulars only came out later when journalism happened.

One of the most important questions of our time is why Leon Black paid Jeffrey Epstein almost $200 million. That was investigated by a fancy law firm called Dechert, and their report defied professional standards in not presenting evidence, and then concluded, laughably, that it was about tax advice.

The NBA Players Association hired a white-glove law firm to investigate the union’s own executive director Billy Hunter. The most salacious finding didn’t make the executive summary, and permitted Hunter to claim a certain kind of exoneration.

I don’t see fancy law firms as the pinnacles of truth-telling. Nor do I see their clients in this case, NBA billionaires, as generally likely to want to drop the hammer on Ballmer. Sure, on some level other billionaires compete with the Clippers. But that’s how fans think. In billionaire world, hell no they don’t want people sniffing around the details of billionaire business. When Sterling got in trouble, Cuban said that he thought policing such things was a “slippery slope.” In the Ballmer case, Cuban says he’s sure Ballmer is in the right, even though he’s dismissive of Pablo’s copious evidence.

I hope that whatever comes from Wachtell sounds like real honest truth, and not just fuzzing up the issues to benefit the rich and powerful. The truth is a real thing and we need it.

The New York Times talked to people across the U.S. about Charlie Kirk’s killing, including a salesman from Florida named Erwin:

Fighting back tears, he said that the killing seemed to arise from an animus that was increasingly disconnected from facts, accountability and reason, to the point that he barely had the stomach to consume news these days.

“It seems like we’re totally living in insanity,” he said, “every moment of every day.”

We don’t share common facts.

I think often of Arkady Babchenko, who explained that he volunteered as a Russian soldier and helped decimate the capital of Chechnya, because of things learned on the TV. By the time I saw him speak at PutinCon, he had learned that he had been lied to through the television–manipulated into violence against fellow Russians.

I know we all love to beat up the news media, and it can be used for evil. But a well-functioning news media is also, as far as I know, the only way to get millions of people sharing the same basic facts. If we’re going to separate fact from fiction on a broad scale, we’re going to need big teams of people, without political agendas, digging through evidence, interviewing, and willing to speak truth to power. We need to know when big tobacco is lying.

And in the example of Russia, the reason that doesn't exist is no accident. Bad men have been looting the country–here’s one report in the wake of the Paradise Papers leak saying that 60 percent of Russia’s gross domestic product is offshore. The oligarchs made a mockery of democracy, in a way that would look awful to honest media.

So goodbye media. The best truth-tellers had their businesses purchased, raided, or maligned. Top journalists were menaced or disappeared. In the absence of real facts, the mouthpieces of the state emerged with shiny budgets and sunny messages about the activities of Putin and his friends. They made it very tough for the Pablo Torres of Russia to question the oligarchs. And they made it easy for Putin to be praised. On screen, the shiny sets of modern Russian media look like the Hunger Games or the set where ESPN hosted Steve Ballmer.

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