How did Pablo Torre break everyone’s brains?

Think back to the first time you saw Pablo Torre on television. Would you have guessed that, years later, he would be the controversial face of sports journalism?

Last week, thanks in part to his reporting, the NBA dropped the hammer on Steve Ballmer and the Los Angeles Clippers. I watched Torre take his victory laps and started thinking about why so many people dismissed his reporting on the team’s efforts to circumvent the salary cap on Kawhi Leonard’s behalf. 

The scandal itself wasn’t exactly unbelievable. Balmer isn’t the first owner in professional sports to think he’s too smart, too rich, or both to get caught. Kawhi Leonard isn’t a beloved figure. Basketball fans weren’t refusing to come to terms with a hero’s betrayal. 

It wasn’t the story that offended people. It was Pablo Torre.

Why?

Because Torre is a hard character to square, he values being a goofball as much as, if not more than, he values the serious work of journalism. That doesn’t mean he is a bad journalist or that his work is invalid. It just means that we aren’t always sure what to do with him.

We all know a Pablo Torre. A guy who keeps one foot planted firmly in adolescence while the other is doing adult things. It can be fun, but it can also make people roll their eyes. 

Investigative journalism is very much a newspaper thing, and Torre is very much a Twitter guy. I don’t recall Woodward and Bernstein showing up on TV every time Richard Nixon denied a Watergate story they reported to demand a public debate. 

Hi Jordon:

Any idea why your screenshot looks like this after you adjust the exposure and highlights?

(@JohnnyBlan57495, who provided the below video, was asking about Adobe Photoshop.)

Thanks,
Pablo https://t.co/3BohNptoLj pic.twitter.com/pop8khwZqI

— Pablo Torre 👀 (@PabloTorre) November 25, 2025

He is a proverbial dog with a bone when it comes to Jordon Hudson, Bill Belichick, and the University of North Carolina’s football team, reporting every twist and turn regardless of how interesting the latest revelation actually is. He even admitted to the popular North Carolina sports podcast Ovies & Giglio last year that, while he stands by his reporting, he may have been a little too loose with some of the language he has used.

Then there’s the show itself. Pablo Torre Finds Out is…well, it’s all kinds of things. It can be a serious investigation one day, a discussion about the mechanisms of sports business the next, and then three people sitting around a table saying “exaaaaactly” over and over again. It will expose Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Harvard University and then devote an episode to the fact that Oz the Mentalist cannot really read people’s minds. 

When you are trying to create a show that has no boundaries about what it can be and where it can go, each subject you cover will be viewed by some through the lens of what you have done in the past.

At its most serious, Pablo Torre Finds Out is trying to do a very old thing (magazine-style journalism) in a very modern environment (podcasting). The findings of big investigations get an episodic rollout and end with a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist clapping back at the haters. That’s hard for some people to square, especially when it’s all wrapped in video game sound effects.

That’s fine if we’re talking about UNC football’s continued ineptitude. It’s a little jarring when it’s something more serious.

To be fair to Torre, he has never claimed that 60 Minutes is what he’s going for. At the same time though, he is winning the same types of awards and insisting his show swims in the same pool as the venerated CBS News magazine. That can break the brains of people programmed to like things simple.

Some writers have made arguments that there are flaws in his reporting on the Clippers. That’s their claim to make. Frankly, I am more fascinated by how people react to Torre and what he’s created than by learning that the Clippers brass is continuing the franchise’s tradition of being terrible at everything it does.