Detroit Pistons & NBA Talk (Part 2)

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Payton Pritchard says hi.

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I side with Al on this regardless of Payton Pritchard and Evan Turner or that guy from Wisconsin (Can’t remember the name because all those Wisconsin guards from the 2010’s are indistinguishable).

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George Carlin once suggested a controversial basketball scoring rule: 25 points for a basket made by the ball bouncing off another player’s head.

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It’s all just a coincidence, sure Cuban and clippers media friends will try to talk this away too!

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came here to say Pablo’s new post is titled “the smoking gun”

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Don’t wory we’ve got another Cuban!

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I just finished listening to it and it’s pretty damning- no smoking gun as far as tying Balmer in writing to circumvention, but the circumstantial evidence keeps piling up to the point that any rational arguments AGAINST circumvention sound far-fetched.

In short:

  • Kawhi was supposed to get his $28 M/4 ($7M/yr) in quarterly payments of $1.75 M
  • Aspiration was in financial distress but a cash flow statement in Oct 22 listened the payment to Kawhi’s holding company as “critical”
  • Dennis Wong, Clippers’ minority owner, and former college roommate of Steve Ballmer made a payment of $1.99 M to Aspiration as an investment- about a week later, Kawhi was paid the $1.75 M. Wong had never before invested in Aspiration and valuation for his invest was roughly at $3 Billion for the company (0.07%)
  • The date of that $1.75 M was on the same date they laid off a lot of employees, including some execs (I think CEO and chief legal counsel IIRC)
  • Oh and Dennis Wong’s daughter was employed by Aspiration at the time all of this was going on- not in finance, but Torre’s sourcing knew her as a colleague
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Pretty sure that Pablo has been sitting on this one just to see the reaction of the first report, and then dropped this last night to double down on it. It’s looking worse for the LAC and Kawhi.

Also, I wonder if the other owners aren’t saying anything because they have done the same for star players. Pablo hinted that it’s the case.

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Pablo said that several owners are irate, actually

I do not think this is a widespread practice.

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Hollinger said specifically that this is absolutely not widespread to his knowledge and he expected the other 29 teams to be pissed

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You can probably count on one hand the amount of owners that are willing to go into the luxury tax without kicking and screaming and people really thought there was this wide spread amount of owners who were willing to burn 20mil+ to circumvent the cap. Yeah sure players using owners houses and jets is common but it was absurd to think something like this Leonard thing was widespread.

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I would bet that Donlan isn’t among this group of owners. Pablo is teasing the Jalen Brunson’s contract.

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Right, there are small time extra perks or whatever that will be thrown in, but nothing even close to $50 mill under the table.

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I think there’s some grey area here re: owner behavior probabilities. Like, the reason why the luxury tax is so hated is bc there’s a cliff where you go from getting paid to having to pay and it’s a big chunk of change and you get nothing for it. Going just over the tax doesn’t get you a much better team or valuation.

It’s a pretty well designed tax from that perspective tbh.

But if you’re an owner contemplating circumvention, there are obvious gains to your team. You get players you wouldn’t otherwise and it’s also a plausible means for avoiding the tax, among other obvious freebies that you get.

So I don’t think it was immediately obvious that nobody else was doing it. I think once you hear something is happening that’s difficult to discover has happened, reasonable to guess it’s not an isolated incident. But I’d forgotten Kawhi had been investigated for exactly this stuff already. And you’re right that Ballmer’s wealth is just an entirely different order of magnitude

https://x.com/MattZeitlin/status/1966140428753023411

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The Knicks have so many shady but allowed things on Brunson

-Their VP is Brunson’s godfather and father of Brunson’s agent

-They hired his dad

-Their initial contract offer to him when he switched teams was considerably higher than the market (Ie, paid him then, maybe don’t need to pay him now)

All these things are iffy and suggest a non-intervening way that Brunson would take a below market contract

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Clippers sent Aspiration 32 mil the day Kawhi signed with Aspiration.

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(Yes I know this is fake)

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:sob: :rofl:

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1002

This is good. By all reports I’ve seen Ace is a good kid. I even have a friend who taught him in HS and speaks very highly of him

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