While most attention around the Los Angeles Clippers’ illicit payments to Kawhi Leonard has focused on the team and Leonard’s representation breaking the rules, far less energy has gone to whether the NBA’s rules make sense in the first place.
The Clippers were fined $30 million and stripped of five first-round draft picks after the NBA found evidence that the team knowingly facilitated business deals between Leonard and team sponsors. Such deals are prohibited under the rules of the league’s collective bargaining agreement between owners and the players’ union.
The punishment was historic, and the result of tremendous effort by Meadowlark Media’s Pablo Torre and the team behind his investigative podcast. It also, as future Hall of Famer and veteran podcaster Draymond Green laid out this week, upholds the spirit of what he sees as a faulty system.
In an interview with Front Office Sports, Green called on the NBA to “get rid of the salary cap as a whole” to avoid these sorts of supposed scandals in the future.
“When you look at teams being sold for 12-and-a-half billion dollars, and athletes can’t participate in that upside that athletes are driving, I think the salary cap is irrelevant,” he said. “I think, get rid of the salary cap as a whole, and we won’t have these types of things.”
Green flipped the debate around the Clippers on its head, arguing that if uber-wealthy owners like the Clippers’ Steve Ballmer believe someone on their team is worth as much as he managed to compensate Leonard, they should be allowed to do so.
“Ultimately, the circumvention was because that guy was worth more than they could pay. So if he’s worth more than they could pay, why can’t he make that?” Green posited.
“I don’t know if anyone’s ever seen Elon Musk’s compensation package from Tesla, but it’s absurd. But guess what? If he can negotiate it, he can get it. So why, in sports, can we possibly negotiate something, but it’s a problem?
“These are the best business owners in the world. They know how to negotiate. These are some of the best business minds, businessmen, businesswomen, in the world. In order to become that, you have to know how to negotiate. So they can negotiate without a salary cap stopping the person who they’re negotiating against. So yeah, I think the salary cap as a whole is doing the league a disservice.”
Many celebrated the historic punishment against Ballmer as a victory against a billionaire rule-breaker. It was. At the same time, it reinforced the salary cap’s legal power, a mechanism whose existence may, for example, lead to another lockout in Major League Baseball later this year.
By punishing Ballmer, the NBA’s salary cap lived to see another day. The victory was notably sealed in part by an agreement with the NBA players’ association that prevented the Clippers from appealing the league’s ruling.
It may not be a surprise given that he is an active player in the league, but Green is by far the most prominent voice in the NBA to use the Clippers scandal to agitate against the anti-labor rules that undergirded it.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is an Editorial Lead at Awful Announcing overseeing digital content and special projects. He lives in Phoenix and has covered sports media for Awful Announcing since 2023.