Over a week and a half of silence from the Clippers organization was broken Sunday night, when owner Steve Ballmer released a statement that he and the team have accepted the NBA’s punishment for salary cap circumvention and will not be moving forward with legal action. In the statement (on his and the Clippers’ Twitter page in full), Ballmer acknowledged the Clippers had been in the wrong (without going into any specifics), reiterated that the NBA investigation got some things wrong, and apologized to the fans and other stakeholders for poor decisions.
Not even a full day later, on Monday afternoon, Shams Charania of ESPN reported that the Clippers were proceeding with the Kawhi Leonard trade to the Raptors now that they’d accepted the punishment and had set their house in order. The terms of the trade are unchanged, with the Clippers received Brandon Ingram, Gradey Dick, two first round picks, a first round pick swap, and two second rounders.
These are all good developments, in my opinion. The Clippers threatening legal actions against the NBA in response to the punishment seemed shortsighted and emotional at best, with almost no chance of anything positive coming from it for the Clippers and the possibility of enraging the NBA even further. Sueing the NBA was not going to work, and I’m glad that the Clippers/Ballmer came to their senses and stepped back. At this point, the evidence laid out in the Wachtell report seemed impossible to satisfactorily answer, and the Clippers just taking the punishment and moving on appeared to be the smartest course of action.
One of the biggest pluses with accepting the punishment is that the Clippers could proceed with the Kawhi deal. For as awful as Kawhi’s tenure now looks, the trade return for him remains incredibly strong. I don’t like watching Brandon Ingram play basketball, but he can help keep the team competent the next year or two. Gradey Dick is an interesting flier (though the team just has way too many 2s and 3s right now). But most importantly, getting those picks back to at least somewhat offset the punishment for cap circumvention is more important than ever. The Clippers are not in a position to trade those picks for players now, but they could be in a couple of years, and having those assets to trade (or just use as picks) will be hugely important.
This should hopefully conclude Kawhi Leonard’s tenure with the Clippers. The Clippers will still be eating the NBA’s punishment for the next seven years, and the sting of being caught cheating will haunt them as well. But the team can finally move on and focus on their young players that are the future of the team, especially Keaton Wagler. I, for one, am interested to see how this post-Kawhi era develops for the Clippers. It would be hard to be more disappointing than the Kawhi era, at the very least.
