Kawhi Leonard and the Los Angeles Clippers have been facing scrutiny for nearly a year over an alleged no-show sponsorship deal with now-defunct sustainability company Aspiration that paid the star millions for no visible work, in an apparent bid to circumvent the NBA salary cap.
According to the latest report from “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” Aspiration allegedly wasn’t the only company doing something like that.
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Scoreboard manufacturer Daktronics, which built the $100 million video board at the Clippers’ Intuit Dome, hired Leonard to a multi-million sponsorship deal for which he has done no work that host Pablo Torre and his staff could find.
Torre cites two sources, one as a “high-level source under contract for Intuit Dome” and the other as a “former high-level Clippers official.” The former provided a number of quotes alleging that Daktronics hired Leonard to a bogus contract, claiming that people who worked on the Intuit Dome were “openly” joking about the deal as being “1,000% a way to circumvent the salary cap.”
Something else said:
“People at Daktronics, people within the Clippers organization themselves, they had told me about this multi-million deal with Kawhi and Daktronics. They are not a company that you would see a celebrity endorser for. It wasn’t coming out of their end, that the Clippers were technically kind of funding it, and that it was funneling money from the Clippers to Daktronics back to Kawhi.”
The second source reportedly confirmed Leonard had a deal with Daktronics worth multiple millions of dollars.
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As opposed to Aspiration, which had lower-paying sponsorship deals with names like Robert Downey Jr. and Leonardo DiCaprio, Daktronics reportedly is not known at all for doing celebrity sponsorship deals. Torre quotes one person identified as a former Daktronics employee who says the company didn’t have any sort of deal like that in the 20-plus years they were there.
Daktronics is a business-to-business company that does not sell products to the average consumer, limiting the impact of celebrity endorsement deals like this one with Leonard, even if he had done anything.
Torre and co-reporter Sam Koppelman of Hunterbrook Media also point to Daktronics being in financial distress in 2023, around the time they were working on the Intuit Dome video board. Daktronics also reportedly used a crisis communications firm that has done work for former Clippers co-owner Shelly Sterling, who oversaw the sale of the team to current owner Steve Ballmer, as well as an LLC owned by Ballmer.
After Torre first broke the Aspiration story, the NBA has been investigating Leonard, Ballmer and the Clippers through independent law firm Wachtell Lipton. That investigation has already caused a trade sending Leonard from the Clippers to the Toronto Raptors to be paused, after the teams were informed the Raptors would be taking on the risk of any sanctions against Leonard or his contract.
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The Clippers have denied any wrongdoing throughout this saga.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver said last month he hopes the matter will be resolved before the end of the summer, in time for the upcoming season, but reports indicate no resolution could come until 2027 if the parties involved don’t agree on a settlement.
It’s unclear if the NBA was already aware of the Daktronics side of the situation, but this certainly won’t cause this thing to be wrapped up any quicker.
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