The Clippers Bombshell & Belichickghazi

0:04Congratulations! You made the varsity, the podcast. My name is John Aranda and I am Puck's sports correspondent and the host of this pod. And today we have Pablo Torre on the pod. Pablo spent about a decade at ESPN as both a writer and a studio host. And he left a couple of years ago and ended up starting his own podcast called Pablo Torre Finds Out. And the pod has been all over the news this year with investigative reports on Bill Belichick, the NFLPA, and most recently, Pablo wrote about allegations that the Clippers circumvented the NBA's salary cap when the team signed its Kawhi Leonard contract.

0:44So we're going to talk about all of that and more. But before we get to Pablo, today is Wednesday, September 10th, and here's what I'm watching. It's NFL Red Zone, or more specifically, it's the commercials on NFL Red Zone. In the NFL's first week, the popular premium channel introduced ads for the first time. Well, it actually tested the idea last season, and Sunday was the first time they were part of the regular schedule. And nothing happened. The world didn't implode. Nobody missed any plays. If you blinked, you would have missed the ads entirely. I mean, it was only one minute worth of ads for 15 second spots that ran over seven hours.

1:30And even those four ads, most of them didn't even take up the whole screen. They ran alongside NFL Red Zone's main feed. But the ads were terrible and fan reaction to them shouldn't be dismissed. I mean, fan reaction will be dismissed. What fan is going to boycott the channel over a couple of unobtrusive ads? But to me, the fan reaction over those ads says so much about how younger people view sports. I attended a family wedding outside of Seattle over the weekend, and every NFL fan at some point complained about even the idea that the league would introduce advertising to a service that has billed itself as commercial-free since its launch way back in 2009.

2:14See, I see the furor as much less about NFL Red Zone and more about a frustration over how expensive it's become for sports fans to watch their favorite teams and leagues. Fans have increasingly felt like they're bearing the cost burden through all the streaming subscriptions they have to get nowadays, not to mention all the tech headaches associated with them. That's partly because they know what's coming next, more ads, and then more ads after that. I mean, why else would the NFL abandon so much goodwill all for the revenue from only four 15-second ads? If it's not a big deal, then why do it at all?

2:54To make up for that black eye, the NFL will need to sell more ads, and then more ads on top of that, and then even more ads on top of that. The NFL clearly believes that consumers will adjust, and the reality is that they probably will. But the reality also is that consumers are getting fed up with soaring prices. The revolt over ads showed that to a T. And at some point, soon enough, there will be the proverbial pebble that starts an avalanche when a critical mass of fans throw up their hands and scream, enough. Okay, now let's get to Pablo Torre. so Pablo one of the things about what you do is you are now an investigative uh reporter and that takes a lot of time and a lot of effort and there are a billion stories that are out there but it also it also you have to find them and and figure out what it what's out there and before we get into some of your specific stories, I just want to ask you about how do you find those stories?

4:01Are they basically stories that are sitting in plain sight? Are you getting sources to call you up and say, hey, you should look here? I'm sure it's a little bit of all the above, but take me through how you find these stories. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for having me. First off, John, that is a question that I'm glad people wonder about. It's definitely changed over time as people know what it is that I do and how I do it. And now you get to be the recipient of tips, which is incredible. I would say the vast majority, though, the super majority of what we do are still self-generated. And so that stems from fundamentally to be abstract and be specific.

4:41abstractly, it stems from my disturbingly sincere level of curiosity. I walk around the world. I live in, you know, New York City, and I walk around the world, and my phone is clenched into a carpal tunneled hand, undiagnosed, but I presume it's clinically there. And I have a note sap full of just ideas. And so I remember Ira Glass, who I got to know recently from This American Life, He described himself as an editor who actually became a host. And he meant that in a couple of different ways, particular to public radio. I relate to that, though, in the sense that I think a big part of what we do is discretion.

5:23Like, what are we chasing down? What are we greenlighting? What are we running with? How do we make it interesting for people who I presume just aren't interested? My default is always someone's looking for an exit ramp somewhere. and never more pressing is that proposition than the age we live in, in which everything's short form and attention spans are non-existent. So that's the abstract sort of approach I have and just my wiring. And then more specifically, yeah, like we can talk about specific examples because they all are different. I would say that this year, this summer has been an opening of the floodgates.

5:59And I have the luxury of presumably being able to cover anything and nothing. And I just think that I've been leaning into the everything part of investigative journalism, which I did at Sports Illustrated, but not in a way where I thought this is going to be like my niche. It's when the incentives aligned around people responding to what I'm doing in the podcast format. And then also my aforementioned genuinely obsessive curiosity. And then the idea that suddenly I'm in a race when it comes to the podcast, digital, video, audio world in which there are very few other runners. I just felt like a thing where the problem was not going to be idea generation.

6:46The problem was going to be idea selection. And that's, I think, why I go back to the whole idea of, I feel like I'm more of a magazine editor, even more than I am a host while I'm doing both of those jobs. So the three big stories, your recent story that have crossed, one is, of course, Belichick and sort of what happened at UNC. Then you had a blockbuster NFLPA story where you got your hands on legal documents. And of course, the reason I reached out to you, the Clippers story that you just did, which alleges that the Clippers skirted salary cap rules in terms of signing Kawhi Leonard. NBA, college football, NFL.

7:36So in terms of selecting, how did those – again, without getting into the really specifics yet, how did you decide on that? Yeah, the test I have is I presume that someone out there doesn't give a shit about sports. And the challenge for me, my way into sports, which was maybe less useful at ESPN, but I find it to be the most useful now, is how can I make someone care about a sports story if they don't care about sports? And so Belichick and Jordan Hudson, I dare say that seems self-evidently interesting to people who don't care about sports. It's almost so much not a sports story that people inside of sports, your mileage varied on whether that was even worthy of my inspection.

8:23And of course, I obsessed over that in a way that invited that criticism and argument and debate. And God bless everybody that I argued with, Bill Simmons. It was incredibly helpful to have that argument. And I'm glad I had it and I would have it again. The NFLPA one, that was one that was so in the weeds of sports law, frankly, an arbitration ruling about guaranteed contracts. And so the challenge for me, John, is how do I explain the importance of guaranteed contracts in the power dynamic between the NFL and the NFL Players Association, their union, in a way that raises the stakes such that people who don't know anything about anything in football can appreciate why this felt nuclear.

9:09And it was inside of football. And so the conveying of stakes to me is one big rule that I have. And there's also just the thing of, is there a way for me to not mischaracterize the complexity, but to simplify it in terms that can allow people to repeat it to a friend after they've listened to the episode? So that's one of the other tests that I also put myself through. And then the third thing, and this brings us to the Kawhi Leonard and Steve Ballmer and Clippers story, is, is it funny? you know like to me there's an easier way to go about this in which i am serving people investigative vegetables and it's just like these are important and you should think it's important because i'm going to tell you why it's important and that feels like a bit i mean look at i by the way i am by no means above those stories and i love to read them and often i love to listen to them.

10:07And I don't deny that sometimes a story is boring, but important. And we should give time to those stories that are boring and important. It's just not going to be the stories that I do, ideally. Now, some, again, mileage varies on whether I just am boring. So I want to acknowledge that. But the point being, the point being that for the Kawhi Clippers Balmer story, there's comedy in that. I love it when there is power when there is money when there is celebrity when there is dramatic stakes when there is surprise and when there is incompetence. It reminds me a bit and again I'm too guilty of comparing things to Succession or fill in the blank HBO Prestige series or the Coen brothers But that realm of what's it like behind closed doors and is it funny once you see back there?

11:07I like things to be smart and funny. I like the vegetables to have broccoli melted on them. I like people to not know that I'm giving them something that's nutritious. And in that way, there's a real harsh filter on what I want to say yes to. But there's also a scope that is like frankly boundless because those are not restrained by genre. that's restrained by like storytelling principles. The idea of it being funny, I find fascinating. The way you described the Clippers, I get it. Belichick and Jordan, that's funny in its own right. NFLPA and the legal documents, how did you find humor in that?

11:49Oh, it's because the very basic premise of like, here you have Roger Goodell, and here you have eight of the wealthiest, most important people in sports. And for the first time, they are subject to expedited discovery in which some schlub like me is going to find what they text like. Like the idea that I'm going to get a text message transcript between Michael Bidwell, the owner of the Cardinals, and Dean Spanos, the owner of the Chargers, in which one will say to the other, Bidwell to Spanos, hey, Dino! Exclamation point. And then they're going to like hash it out over how it's great that Kyler Murray didn't get the guarantees and therefore Justin Herbert didn't get the guarantees.

12:31I will admit that a lot of the responsibility, because that one, you're right to point out, is dense and dry. It is an arbitration ruling. It is 61 pages. It is very much not even a legal thriller. It is very much like an excavation through stuff that is on an objective level boring. But if I can bring, and this is where, how do we bring the humor into it? The question is, can I find myself laughing as I tell the story and laughing at the person that I bring on to help me tell it? And so look, it's never going to be the same recipe. But if you can tell me that, gosh the NFL PA itself is going to be rife with this like this is really how this operates this is really how these people go I mean look Don Vanetta had the strip club receipts do you know how jealous I was that I didn't have the strip club receipts you now understand my storytelling recipe John the strip club receipts would have been very important for me DVN also had the driver that was got how much was the driver the 7-8 hours for Exactly.

13:45Waiting outside of the can-can club. Outside of, excuse me, that's the largest strip club in America. Tootsies to you, John, how dare you? But to get to that point, once you realize like, oh, wow, there is rank incompetence. I find that there tends to be humor. And look, for me, part of what I always want is, and this is maybe inconvenient at times, I do want to laugh at something. That's just Tony Kornheiser. He's the one who impressed upon me. I'm not going to pretend like in any way I'm a pioneer, nor is he on, quote unquote, smart and funny. But that's what he impressed upon me. That's why he is the way he is.

14:29That's why I quietly am trying to figure out my own imitation of that principle. Yeah, you are a pioneer in some respects. And I want to take a quick break and I want to come back and talk about your podcast and sort of taking investigative journalism, which, like you said, you did it at Sports Illustrated. You were a writer at ESPN before you became a host of High Noon. And so, like, it's the province almost of general, you know, of print, of online. And you took it into the podcast. And I want to dive into that a little bit.

15:12so pablo help me out with when you came up with your idea for doing a podcast that was going to be based on investigative journalism what what did you see in the market why did you what why did you think that was going to work yeah so i hosted espn daily for two years and change over the pandemic. And that's where I learned the art of podcast production, in which I realized that these are all kind of like mini documentaries. You have a conversation, you and somebody else, you can slide in some storytelling elements, some docu-style elements, some tape, some music, some archival video or imagery, if you could make it into a television show, kind of like equivalent.

15:54And I'm kind of like jumping ahead of myself, but at ESPN Daily, that was audio only. I began to realize that what we were doing in audio production, those elements could be done also in video. And so I start with just like, what's the job in front of me? How can I do this so I can get paid and send my daughter to various levels of education? That's exactly why we all do what we do. Let's be honest. Yes. My incentive structure is very simple in that regard. I am a craven dad hoping to not humiliate his family. But then once you sort of realize, oh, there's a way to tell like docu-style stories, then it's how do you do it if you're the one telling them?

16:31So ESPN Daily, I was always the guy, a bit of a cruise ship director, welcoming people on. And here is our act tonight playing, you know, and I've never been on a cruise. I was going to say main stage. It sounds like I'm now a host at Tootsies, so forgive me. Whatever they say on a cruise ship. And it's about the guest. It's about the reporting they did. So for me, it was, okay, So I want to be centered around journalism because that's what I did have done my whole life as a journalist ever since I was a fact checker at Sports Illustrated, which is the very, again, admittedly relatively boring origin story that I was crossing off words at Sports Illustrated in order to climb the ladder.

17:08Like, is this correct? Yes or no? Can move on. So for me, that was always like the core of it. But then it was looking around and realizing the thing is not that people don't do journalism. The thing is that in the digital media economy, people don't do it with a frequency in audio and video that can be sort of both economically and conceptually presented as, and this is one of the worst terms that ever got introduced to me, but I resemble and I'm haunted by it. Here we go. Here we go. Always on. Are you an always on show? Are you just pumping out content forever? and ESPN Daily taught me that I could conceptually and structurally do that.

17:56Pablo Torre finds out was premised on the idea, I want to do that but not five days a week because that is too much. Three days a week, spoiler alert, still too much but we're doing it nonetheless. But the point being that if I could do that where I'm reporting, then I know how to make this work. I know how to tell these stories. I know what I need. And so when you now compare that to, and there are some amazing limited run podcast series out there, these like short run narrative things that are like deep dive. Like for instance, each of those stories you mentioned that I did inside of the flow of an always on show is what makes us unique actually.

18:31So we're doing three episodes a week, but inside of that you're getting any number of ongoing serialized, serial, This American Life style productions. That's what we aspire to, at least. Not to say that we're anywhere quite as good as what they do. I think they're great. But that hidden inside of always on is what's different. And that's the difficulty, but that's the upside, is that no one else is doing that in that format. So now you've raised an expectation level of how often you can do this. But if you can deliver on it, it is alone in a category that has to check each of the boxes that I mentioned.

19:11It's really hard. And you need a team. You need, I think, an experience of production in the way that I probably just described it. So I don't even know if I answered your question. But the premise is I knew I could do journalism in the 2025 era of sports media. The question is, is the medium the message? And for me, I've discovered that the medium is so important. Don't fight people on Medium. Wherever they are, and by the way, it's just an argument for, I guess, yeah. Don't get into wars on newsletter platforms. Don't fight people on medium.com or substack.com or on twitter.com. But also, don't fight people when they're telling you we're over here and try to drag them elsewhere.

19:58Like I'm doing a show for people who are on the most popular platforms, YouTube, et cetera. And so I sort of work backwards from that. Who do you consider to be your competitor? And please don't answer this by saying everyone. Like in terms of doing what you do with video and YouTube and audio podcasting format, who else is out there doing what you're doing? That's such a great – I mean I don't say this facetiously. That's a really good question because I can tell you who I admire and I'm jealous of and instinctively. And so I just and I just had the pleasure of working with the aforementioned Ira Glass on This American Life.

20:38He adapted an episode of Pabla Torre finds out about the Honduran Maradona, the story of a kid, a 16 year old in England who faked the existence of. Anyway, I don't want to spoil it, but he made up a legend that then went around the world, got a million dollar MLS deal. It's the story of what happened when he investigated what actually happened in real life. So I love that story. Sounds like a modern day Freddie Adu from DC United. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In this case, it involved Wikipedia and more lying. So shout out to Freddie Adu on that front. So for me, look, I am trying to figure out, and this is just, I will be craving for you because I know you don't want me to spin.

21:22I think This American Life is the best in terms of audio-only production that I've ever heard. And I'm not some historian of audio production, but I've been really interested in what does it sound like if an audio-only radio show, in that case now podcast Empire, also feels like a movie in your ears? What is that like? So I'm deeply jealous of that. And so working with them was a real joy. Radio Lab, I think about them in the same regard. Similarly, these public radio style shows, frankly. And I say that because the thing that I'm doing is not, there is no TV show that's like the TV show that I do.

22:03And I say that not because I'm pumping out whatever, I'm puffing out my chest rather. I say that because the bones of what I'm thinking about story to story, in terms of the reporting and the production, I edit our show only in audio. And we are piecing together the video, certainly from conception, but I'm never actually editing on the video level. I'm editing only for ears. So the reason I'm listening to those shows is because they're the best at editing. I think editing, that's clear, hopefully, structure and editing, these are hard things to ask always-on shows to do because these are shows with short staffs.

22:46They're shows that have lots of output. So again, I say that I acknowledge the different proposition economically that I'm demanding, frankly. I need support. I can't do this by myself if we're going to do it the way that I've been doing it. So I start with that audio stuff. But then, I mean, yeah, I think about the great documentarians. That's who I think about. And I think of the great print journalists. Like, I, I, I, I, there are some shows that I really like, um, out there that are in the category broadly of what I do, but now I want to turn to the video side and I'm like, look, I'm jealous of people who are great talkers on television.

23:28Um, and I look up to them and I can, whatever, give you my, my Mount Rushmore of sports media gas bags, but I think that's probably the least interesting thing I could have insight on. but they're just not doing what I'm doing anymore. And so I don't really know who to compare myself to. Real sports used to be the gold standard, obviously, for a version of this. 60 Minutes is something that I look up to. Look, the news magazine show, John, the investigative news magazine show premised on journalism. If 60 Minutes liked getting stoned, I think I would be a lot more insecure about what I'm doing.

24:05But I just think that we are demographically quite far apart, but they are probably still the gold standard in terms of what the premise of that kind of a television show would be. John Oliver, sorry, John Oliver is who I'm the most jealous of for that reason. Yeah. Do you operate on deadlines? The Clipper story, if that wasn't ready, Are you prepared to hold it for a couple of weeks or like are you dependent on like, OK, geez, I got I got these three episodes a week. I need to fill this in X. Yeah, this is you've now hit upon a real running joke on our staff in our newsroom because I'm always like, look, we're going to pad this month out.

24:51We'll get some easy lifts just like hangs with my friends. We'll do some share and tell episodes. And by the way, there are some people who listen to my show for whom that's their favorite style of show. The talk show hangs with friends in which we can do our own style. But and I love those. And they're the easiest to make. The running joke is that I keep on saying that and I keep on finding new multi-part investigations force us to compete with the biggest news breaking entities in sports media and beyond. So, yes, the answer is we aspire to unintentionally and my brain is mush someone unintentionally punning the company that we investigated.

25:29I aspire to do fewer stories like aspiration in that regard. But when we're in it, we're like a dog with a bone on that thing. You know, we're doing multi part episodes like that one is still ongoing. The NFLPA one is still ongoing. The Belichick Jordan Hudson thing is still ongoing. And the reason you haven't seen us just crank those out in terms of like, let's say, the Belichick and Hudson now was months ago now. It's because to your point, we really are waiting for how to make an impact that doesn't feel cheap. I think the standard for what constitutes a worthwhile sequel is frankly like again, and maybe this is I'm realizing I operate from a place of insecurity.

26:15I'm assuming someone doesn't want to listen to this. So I'm like, how can I convince you to give me an hour of your time when I'm competing in the way that Netflix is, as you know, in the way that everything is with sleep, with a zillion TikTokers, with you, with your anything, with your kids? Like, it's just the hardest ask is time. And so the fact that I'm asking a lot of it while also doing a lot, I just keep on trying to assure people it's not under-considered when we do an episode. That's spoken like every true media executive. The biggest issue is time. There's only so much time, and you've got to get somebody to watch your stuff for time.

26:56Why am I going to sit through a long documentary on, you know, I don't care about the Clippers. Why am I going to sit through that? And that's the whole issue right there, right? Oh, man. But that's what was so shocking, John, because, of course, like anytime you're and you know this, anytime you try to do something even vaguely entrepreneurial, as I have been trying and you're like, oh, OK, I got to start something new. You think about it like you're your own. You're cosplaying a media executive. You're always trying to figure out what's the business of this thing. The Clipper story was fascinating because it is by far the most popular thing we've ever done.

27:29And that surprised me on the level of certainly just basic metrics. It surprises me to hear that. Oh, it's just. I would have put Belichick and Jordan up there at like top. And I think, by the way, and they're different probably standards of success. I'm saying most successful thing purely on the level of like metrics. So Jordan and Belichick, I think, had the grandest sort of like broadest sweep of a story in terms of like everybody and their mom seemed to know about that. this one though the reason I think we're isolating it in that regard is because that one was so unlikely to have the broad appeal from non-NBA fans and others and it has and I just say that metrically that's just become clear in terms of whatever and the statistics on like everything all these numbers are fake by the way but let's just say like on x.com whatever we're up to like there was the tweet we sent out was that 32 million or some crazy number.

28:31And then the YouTube numbers are crazy. And so none of that's sustainable, by the way. But in terms of just like what is working, I say this sometimes, but I feel this genuinely. Making content in 2025 feels like you're putting your work on an altar and waiting for the sun god to shine upon you or smite your family. Like I don't always know what it's going to like, the algorithm, but they like this one. And so I just jump on that here because to be rewarded in that way is to then say, of course, you should do more of this. But then the counter argument is, is it going to feel cheap as opposed to something that is impactful?

29:15And so anyway, I just think that that one being a story about salary cap circumvention and carbon offsets. Let's put it this way. The superlative I would give it is no story has outkicked its coverage, overperformed its sort of like expectations more than that one probably. Yeah. Billionaire owner, no show job, NBA superstar. I can kind of see it. The Sopranos memes were a tell for me. I was like, oh, wait a minute. People are connecting the no show thing here. This is beyond just nerd stuff. Yeah. One more quick break, and I want to come back and talk a little bit more about that.