Hour 2: Pablo Torre’s Clippers/Kawhi Bombshell, Kurt Warner on Eagles, Chiefs & Chargers

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0:55Rich Eisen:This is the Rich Eisen Show. Hey, everybody. Can't get enough of The Rich Eisen Show? You're in luck. You can find us everywhere. Watch us weekdays on Disney Plus from noon to 3 Eastern. Miss the show? We've got a podcast so you can listen anytime. But here's the best part. Our YouTube channel. Subscribe at youtube.com slash Rich Eisen Show and you'll never miss a moment. Now, on with the show. This is The Rich Eisen Show. Live from the Rich Eisen Show studios in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

1:38Rich Eisen:Today's guests, podcast host and journalist Pablo Torre, pro football Hall of Famer Kurt Warner, and your phone calls, latest news, and more. And now, it's Rich Eisen.

1:57Rich Eisen:This is as close to Antarctica as I've ever been on a live stream in my entire life. So glad we can be all hanging here on Disney Plus, the ESPN app and ESPN radio presented by Progressive Insurance. All hanging out together. 844-204-RICH is the number to dial here on the show. Kurt Warner is in our green room here in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The two of us are going to be calling the Chiefs and the Chargers in just one night on YouTube. that's an around the globe, no pressure broadcast. Wherever you are on planet Earth, you'll be able to check that game out. Kurt and I will be calling in the action.

2:36Rich Eisen:Stacey Dales will be on the sideline along with destroying as well. I do believe, TJ, Mr. Beast did a video with Roger Goodell. Oh, really? Am I mistaken about that since you're the Mr. Beast expert of the Rich Eisen show? I don't know much about Mr. Beast. I've got to be honest with you. I'm just throwing that in your direction. But yes, I can confirm Mr. Beast did that on his YouTube channel. And again, Bill Burr is lighting up ours right now. So if you miss anything of this program, there's so many different ways for you to catch up with us. You can go to our page on Disney Plus and the ESPN app, click on our logo, and boom, you get to our page.

3:17Rich Eisen:And that day's show pops up. There's our podcast version of this show through the ESPN Podcast Network, wherever you get your pods. All three hours of this program available that way. And then there's our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash RichEyesandShow. Kurt Warner is going to be joining us in the middle of this hour, not hour number three, because he got here nice and early. Believe it or not, San Paolo traffic was actually cooperating. And then he's going to hang with us at the top of hour number three as well. So we'll have a nice hour with my buddy Kurt. But joining us right now, because he found something out.

3:49Rich Eisen:is the host of Pablo Torrey finds out. Ladies and gentlemen, Pablo Torrey back on the program. Good to see you, Pablo. How are you, sir? You know, I miss the even more luxurious studio that I got to visit. So it's good to virtually be back with you. Well, I'm not in that studio. I'm in Brazil of all places. So look at this technology in 21st century being able to hook us all up. Yeah, I'm doing chief chargers. I'm a terrible journalist, it turns out. Are you finding something out on live Disney Plus and ESPN Radio, Pablo? I'm informing you of something. Yes. So there you have it. Run with that.

4:27Rich Eisen:I don't know what Cuban's going to say about that, but we'll get to this in a moment. Pablo, what did you find out? Can you lay out for everybody what you just found out about Kawhi, Clippers, and Bomber et al? Please. Yeah, it's an unprecedented scandal when it comes to the cardinal sin of the NBA. And those are Adam Silver's words, the cardinal sin part, which is salary caps or convention. The NBA, for the record, is investigating. The Clippers deny so much of what I'm about to tell you. So just keep that in mind as I legally and journalistically try to be as fair as possible to everybody involved.

5:02But what I found and what I reported is that there was a secret$28 million deal that Kawhi Leonard signed, an endorsement deal, which nobody heard about, which is, I think, relevant because it's an endorsement deal. Typically, with endorsements, you want people to know that the person is endorsing something. This is a deal that nobody knew about with a company called Aspiration. And Kawhi Leonard, for the record here, did absolutely nothing. And the reason that matters is because Aspiration happens to be a company that Steve Ballmer, the richest owner in all of sports, all of the world, when it comes to sports, the sixth or seventh richest person on the planet, He had put$50 million of his own personal money into this company.

5:42And this company also, you may vaguely recall, as one of the key sponsors, a founding sponsorship partner of the Intuit Dome and the Los Angeles Clippers. This company aspiration was going to be the jersey patch. They were on the backs of the courtside seats. They had signage everywhere. This company could not be more enmeshed with the Clippers. What I'm saying via seven sources used to work at Aspiration, the company, as well as over 3 ,000 pages of documents, is that this is a deal that was brokered to explicitly circumvent the salary cap for the Los Angeles Clippers and Steve Ballmer.

6:17Rich Eisen:Now, is there anything that you found that has those words, though? Like this is specifically for that or are you gleaning through all the information that you have unearthed or sought out? Yeah, it's a great question. That this is all happening, that where's the connective tissue to this was a circumvention of the salary cap and thus the cardinal sin that would leave the NBA in quite the predicament of what to do? Yeah, it's a great question. And the NBA is, of course, looking into this now in their investigation, which they announced. So the context here before I get to the specifics, because I think it's a useful context, is that 2019, the NBA investigates this.

6:56The cardinal sin quote is from Adam Silver about how the Clippers got Kawhi Leonard in the first place. This was all teams, all sorts of teams, the Lakers, the Raptors making complaints to the league. There was a big meeting about this in which the NBA looked into it. They found nothing, no punishment. But there was this recognition around the league that something to them seemed off. And so that's why Adam Silver warned everybody, don't do this, Cardinal sin. That's that quote. The specifics here, though, as a journalist, I start with the sources. So in terms of these sources, the key aspect of aspiration of the company is that this company has since collapsed in disgrace and bankruptcy.

7:29See, one of the co-founders, a guy named Joe Sandberg, who Steve Ballmer is on emails with personally doing business development for Aspiration, the company. That guy has pled guilty now to two counts of wire fraud to the federal government. The DOJ is investigating. The SEC is investigating. None of this is what you asked. What you asked about is, is there a smoking gun in which Steve Ballmer says, do this so I can pay Kawhi Leonard? Of course, Steve Ballmer did not write that down on paper. But in terms of the story of Aspiration, the reason these seven sources are meaningful, and I want to explain this as a journalist, is because the reason that Joe Sandberg has pled guilty now to two counts of wire fraud, the reason why the DOJ, the SEC, the CFTC, the FBI have been looking into this giant scandal is because internally there were employees who signed up to work at Aspiration, which was a climate change company, a good guy company.

8:20They were planting trees to zero carbon footprints. And those people started noticing things that were entirely wrong when it came to malfeasance and corruption inside the company. That's why Joe Samberg just pled guilty to two counts of wire fraud. So the people I'm talking to are the people who identified this problem and, to me, could not be more credible about this issue. So when they say to me, we asked around and truly so many people inside the company knew more than just the seven is what I was told, but I only have the seven, so I only quote the seven. They say it was communicated to us.

8:55The reason why Kawhi Leonard did zero things, the reason why nobody knew about the endorsement deal, despite all this interconnectedness, the reason why he got$28 million, which is multiples bigger than a normal sponsorship deal from a guy in Steve Ballmer, excuse me, from a company in Aspiration, which has just gotten $50 million from Steve Ballmer was because explicitly we need to circumvent the salary cap for our most influential investor. And so there's lots more evidence that provides the context. But to me, Rich, there's an IQ test here. And the NBA, of course, is not a real justice system.

9:28It's an entity that has to make decisions about what kind of IQ test do we expect our fans, our owners, and all of our media to pass.

9:37Rich Eisen:Now, Pablo Torre here on the Rich Eisen Show, Just again, I'm playing the devil's advocate here, Pablo. Please. Okay. So it just strikes me as$28 million. That is a sizable amount of money, obviously. But why wouldn't they just pay him that money on a contract? Like, why create this sort of back channel? Was it cap-related, apron-related? Like, have you done any dot connecting there? Because again, for, and again, you're putting it out there, man, that is for sure. And I imagine there'll be some Clipper legal pushback in your direction here. that all of these dots that you have and that you say that there are some people who told you from the company that used to exist that there is their there on this, that connecting the dots to say this was a specific circumvention of the salary cap for 28 million.

10:42Rich Eisen:It's not like 200 million, right? Like that seems to be a number that you'd want to circumvent the cap for. But 28 million in cash sounds like chump change when you're talking about supermax contracts pablo you know oh i think the nba context is very important here and you're raising good questions that i think a general audience would have interest in as well and so thank you for asking them i think the key distinction here is that when you talk people around the league the reason why i say this is the biggest scandal and unprecedented is because when you look at endorsement deals in general right that's superstar players signed with nba team sponsors even right this is again the company aspiration was supposed to be on the jersey patch, right?

11:19It's signed numbers everywhere. This is an arrangement that happens in other forms around the league. But in terms of the contracts that players market value typically sign, it's never as big as$28 million. And so that's actually off the graph when it comes to the standard market rate. And so then the question is, well, why did they want to pay it? Well, it's because Kawhi Leonard, according to my reporting, according to the investigation, by the way, that was raised in 2019 that got that Adam Silver quote in the first place, What I'm picking up the thread of is in 2021, when it came to the extension, Kawhi Leonard wanted another max contract.

11:55Boardman gets paid, right? The guy wants to get paid. He's a capitalist. And God bless Kawhi Leonard for being economically minded, right? That's not illegal. What is elicit, though, by NBA rules, of course, is the question of can you pay someone the max contract and then on top of that, pay them through this side deal with the influence of the owner of the team? And so$28 million may seem like chump change in the world of Steve Ballmer in the abstract. In the NBA, this has landed like a comet because this is, if my reporting is correct, which again, I stand by fully and completely, it is explosive.

12:32We just haven't seen this level of ambition for it before. And so the other key detail here in terms of just like how much money is at stake? Why are they doing this? What's floating around here? I think the other thing that people need to understand about Aspiration is that Kawhi Leonard was not the only endorsement contract they signed. They had Robert Downey Jr., Leonardo DiCaprio, Drake, Orlando Bloom, Cindy Crawford, Cindy Crawford's daughter, Doc Rivers. Go down the list. A bunch of famous people. Kawhi Leonard's contract was for a sum that was more than four times every other one of those contracts I mentioned combined.

13:15And the key clause in the contract was it could be terminated if he no longer played for the Clippers. And also, contractually, he had no obligation to do anything if it did not conform with his beliefs, small b beliefs, which is a thing that lots of people who analyze contracts have pointed out. He basically had outs to do nothing. And in fact, the company itself, Aspiration, nor the Clippers, ever announced that he had signed anything as an endorsement deal. So the question I have at the end of this IQ test is why would this be the case when Steve Ballmer is also investing$50 million into the company?

13:51These are the questions that the NBA has to investigate now.

13:54Rich Eisen:Pablo Torre finds out. Podcast host Pablo Torre here on The Rich Eisen Show. Let's get to what Cuban was tweeting at you. you know Mark Cuban who obviously knows about ownership and knows about caps and knows about things like that his tweet essentially was saying he wishes this was a circumvention of the cap because as a former competitor of the Clippers in Dallas he says that Steve isn't that dumb if he tried to feed Kawhi money knowing what was at stake for him personally and his team do you think he would let the company go bankrupt knowing all the creditors would be visible to the world he's basically saying that he got scammed by aspiration and that scammers do scammy things um and that you know the 300 million dollar sponsorship deal with the clippers in 2021 was a huge deal the better the team does the more value the sponsorship has so uh why not give stolen money to help keep their best player if that actually makes perfect sense that they stole money from investors and want the clippers to succeed um and what's your response your response to him was say, come on the show, let's talk about it.

15:00Rich Eisen:First of all, is he gonna? And two, what's your response in the interim to what he was tweeting at you, basically saying that there's a reasonable explanation from the management suite as to what was going on with Cuban, with the Bomber, this company, and Kawhi? Yeah, I'm so glad Mark tweeted that, because what happened next was I invited him on the show, and Mark Cuban's the kind of guy who, despite being, by the way, currently, not the majority owner, but 27 % owner of the Mavericks, is the rare type of owner who says, I have lots of thoughts about this, even though I'm sort of coming at this late and from the outside, right?

15:36And I love that because I do want unvarnished perspective from other people in the management suite. Now, notably, I have heard from other people in the management suite and the executive class of the NBA and in sports in general after the story, none of them want to talk about this on Twitter, let alone with me on my show, but they have, I will say, thoughts that largely diverge from Mark Cuban's perspective. But the question of did Mark Cuban come on my show is where I get to now promote the fact that tomorrow's episode of Public Torrey finds out is my conversation with Mark Cuban that was extensive and argumentative and fascinating and honestly illuminating.

16:12Because how rich, this is something that I genuinely love to cover on my show. What's it actually like in a billionaire's brain? You know, like these are the people who run the world. They run sports. We live in an era in which these owners, as you know, have never been richer. And Steve Ballmer is the richest one in the world. And so Mark Cuban, being a guy who has had to deal with Steve in meetings, of course, is a fellow owner in the league, has, of course, familiarity with all the players involved. When he says something, it matters simply from his perspective. So I don't want to speak for Mark in the episode because I need to promote the episode and send my daughter to kindergarten, Rich.

16:51but what i will say is that we vehemently disagree about some things agree about some key i think through lines and i think the key fulcrum of disagreement is this and i'll i'll say this in a way that's meaningful but also a tease when does one of the smartest people the smartest businessman the guy hailed as the greatest investor of the last 20 years and steve bomber right the richest man in sports when does he get to be smart and when does he get to be stupid When do we hold him to account for being very brilliant at business? When does he get to plausibly know nothing? This is a through line a bit in sports as well as in life these days, the convenience of ignorance from people who should know better.

17:33And the question becomes, for the NBA at least, as well as the federal government, by the way, from a larger, broader concern now that we're bringing in real life, what did you know, when did you know it, what should you have done, and what did you do? and we get into that in depth which i appreciate with mark and we tweeted about how much he enjoyed it just a matter of like spoiler alert we're not going to come out of this suing each other yet but it is something that gets contentious in a very productive way i thought so um just to

18:02Rich Eisen:i guess bring this to a full circle had kawaii hired somebody out of college to just shoot a video of him planting a tree would this have been different i'm i'm i know it sounds flippant pablo but you know i mean would this be different that he actually did something and and and all it would cost literally would be a few hundred dollars to hire somebody to create a real pop it on instagram pop it on tiktok a youtube short facebook and then all of a sudden he's done something uh would it would be different paul i i think it would have been a different story because this is a story ultimately about extreme people doing extreme things i mean the first part complimentary these are extreme characters the greatest athletes the richest people i mean the latter in a more subjective way extreme things meaning how could you be so let's call it anti-strategic to not consider that all you had to do was anything like it's not Not even that he had to do anything, right?

19:02Because the contract he signed, again, he fulfilled the terms of the contract which said he didn't have to do anything. Really what I'm saying is, if they had just announced it, would this have been less suspicious? Because the way I found it, and this is where I think Mark and I, again, a bit of the foreshadowing here, the diverging that happened was around the fact of Steve would never do this because this is so stupid. And I guess what I'm saying here without trying to be too, you know, naval gazey is that if not for the reporting, the seven sources who were courageous enough to talk to me about a very sensitive federal investigation, as well as the documentation I acquired, more than 3 ,000 pages, as well as all of that surrounding research, if not for all of those things coming together because of a bankruptcy filing, which I alluded to before, in which there was a clue about the company Kawhi Leonard had started, KL2 Aspire LLC.

19:53whose designated representative was Uncle Dennis Robertson. If not for that little line item in a bankruptcy filing that no one else noticed, this would not have been a problem. None of this would have happened. No one would be talking about it. No one would be wondering about a weird tree planting company and Steve Ballmer and Kawhi Leonard and this company no one remembers despite the fact that they were very instrumental in the origin story of the Intuit Dome. They would have gotten away with it. And now I'm going to quote Scooby-Doo. If not for those meddling kids. And unfortunately, I am the meddling kid.

20:26I will own up to that. And so if Kawhi had done anything to make it seem that much more plausible so that when I Googled what has Kawhi Leonard done to endorse the company that he's owed millions of dollars to for an endorsement deal, which, again, of course, I acquired the document for, it would have been probably a different outcome from the perspective of me noticing something was really, really smelly about what was going on here.

20:51Rich Eisen:Pablo, thanks for the time. I always appreciate you coming on this program. And I will be, I know what I'll be downloading for my flight back from Brazil. I know what I got. I'll be listening. Rich, thank you. Do some capoeira for me out there while you're, while I got some free time. Say that one more time. Some capoeira. You know, some of them, some like dance karate. That's, I mean, what you're finding out about is the art of capoeira. Dance karate. here and i'm getting a lot of brazilian blank stares back at me there was a movie called only the strong pablo knows what it is back in the day thank you very good thank you well that'll be one thing that you definitely won't be finding out is me doing exactly what you were suggesting um i i look forward to listening to your conversation with mark cube and pablo thanks for the time brother appreciate it thank you sir anytime that's pablo tori right there uh on the Rich Eisen show quite a story and a development in the National Basketball Association.

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24:13Rich Eisen:The Rich Eisen Show Podcast. Back here in Brazil, ESPN Radio is presented by Progressive Insurance. They offer auto home and commercial auto insurance. Visit progressive.com. Life is amazing, folks, because, you know, once upon a time, I watched this guy play football. And then I actually watched him play in person at the Super Bowl in Tampa, where his Cardinals were crushing it. And they went up on the Steelers, unfortunately didn't win it. But never in a million years did I think, A, I would get to know the guy. B, I'd get to know and love the guy. See, I'd get to know and love his family. I would work with the guy all the time and start collecting countries on the planet, which I'd be calling football games.