Pablo Torre is still on the case when it comes to the saga surrounding Kawhi Leonard and whether or not a no-show sponsorship circumvented the salary cap when he signed with the Los Angeles Clippers.
The initial story sent shockwaves through the NBA and even led to Clippers billionaire owner Steve Ballmer having to do damage control on SportsCenter. Torre built a formidable case on his podcast that Leonard’s sponsorship deal with Aspiration was cover for a massive sweetener for his signing with the Clippers worth tens of millions of dollars.
As the story broke, Torre said that the investigation would be one of the biggest challenges of Adam Silver’s tenure as NBA commissioner when faced with what he believes is a clear and obvious assault on the integrity of the league.
However, several months after the story broke, Silver and the NBA have yet to act. At last month’s All-Star Game, Silver said in his annual press conference that the league had an outside law firm investigating and preached patience given how complex the situation has been.
So with both appearing at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, Pablo Torre made a statement that it shouldn’t be all that complex for Adam Silver… in a way that only Pablo Torre can.
Torre hosted a live show of his Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast with David Samson and Amin Elhassan where he promised new information about the Kawhi Leonard controversy. That info was a 2023 SEC whistleblower complaint that clearly outlined the Leonard sponsorship was done with the Clippers in mind.
Over the last year, Torre has brilliantly found a way to bring an entertainment factor to journalism and sports reporting, and he did it once again at the Boston conference.
“I just cannot help but wonder what other evidence Adam Silver’s NBA may be sitting on. And I actually happen to mean that last part quite literally,” Torre said.
At that point, Torre instructed Samson and Elhassan to look underneath their chairs where his team had taped a document of a 2023 whistle-blower complaint filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and led to Aspiration co-founder pleading guilty to two felony counts of wire fraud. The document states that the Clippers had an escrow account with Aspiration where the bulk of it was used “to pay Clippers forward Kawhi Leonard an incentivized bonus to circumvent the NBA’s salary cap, disguised as an organic marketing sponsorship agreement.”
REVEALED: Whistle-blowers warned the SEC in 2023 that the LA Clippers and Aspiration “disguised” Kawhi Leonard’s marketing deal “to circumvent the NBA’s salary cap,” according to a secret government complaint obtained by @PabloTorre — and signed under penalty of perjury. pic.twitter.com/s7Mt7kqjb0
— Pablo Torre Finds Out (@pablofindsout) March 6, 2026
But it wasn’t just Samson and Elhassan who were sitting in those chairs. It was the same chair that NBA commissioner Adam Silver was sitting in during a different panel earlier in the day before he flew to Washington DC to be a part of President Donald Trump’s White House panel on college athletics.
Pablo Torre then made a point to tell Adam Silver on social media that the evidence he needs to make a decision on the Kawhi Leonard case was literally right under his nose.
Adam Silver, all the evidence you need for the Kawhi Ballmer case was just a biiiiiiiit closer than you realized this morning pic.twitter.com/Mum2Ou1syR
— Pablo Torre Finds Out (@pablofindsout) March 7, 2026
Even though the Aspiration drama captivated much of the sports world when the news was first broken, it’s been hard for the story to stay in the headlines as the NBA season has marched ahead. There have been slow drips of news, but given how explosive the original podcast was from Torre, it’s always going to be tough to feel like the story can be moved forward in a meaningful way. That’s especially true given that Adam Silver and the NBA have basically washed their hands of taking any action until an outside firm completes an investigation.
But as Pablo Torre has shown time and time again, he is just as adept at marketing and social media as he is at journalism. The only thing that would have topped this chair trick is if he would have crashed Adam Silver’s panel and handed him the SEC whistleblower complaint himself to truly get his attention. Maybe that’s what has to come next.
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