LOS ANGELES — The NBA imposed a sweeping punishment against the Los Angeles Clippers on Wednesday for violating salary cap circumvention rules, suspending owner Steve Ballmer for one year, fining the team $30 million and forcing it to forfeit five first-round draft picks.
Also, two-time NBA Finals MVP Kawhi Leonard was hit with a $700,000 penalty, president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank was banned for six months and team president of business operations Gillian Zucker was suspended for one year.
The Clippers will give up one first-round pick in each draft from 2029-2033.
The league came down hard on the organization after a nearly yearlong investigation led by an outside law firm.
The Clippers had said multiple times that they had done nothing wrong and expected to be exonerated.
Frank, in the spring, said, “If you know Steve and know Steve’s integrity, you know there’s nothing to it. We believe and we’ve very confident we’re on the right side of this.”
The team maintained that stance Wednesday.
“We vehemently reject the NBA’s findings, which are the result of a heavily biased investigation seeking to justify a predetermined narrative rather than facts and evidence,” the team said in a statement. “What the league told us privately differs from what it announced today publicly, and they have not held themselves close to the standard commissioner (Adam) Silver set at the start of this investigation to ensure its fairness and accuracy.”
The Clippers said they will “now fight just as hard to demonstrate our innocence. We intend to vigorously challenge these findings and penalties through every avenue available to us and look forward to an ethical and impartial arbitration process.”
The league said it and the players' union agreed to confirm the penalties as final and binding on all parties. It said the outside law firm continues to receive information involving the investigation, and the league “will consider further action as appropriate.”
“I am deeply disappointed by the flagrant violations of our rules and by the Clippers' institutional and leadership failures that led to this misconduct,” Silver said in a statement. “The severity of the penalties reflects the seriousness of the violations.”
The NBA began investigating in September 2025 whether a $28 million endorsement contract between Leonard and Aspiration Fund Adviser LLC — a company that filed for bankruptcy last year — broke league rules, following a report by journalist Pablo Torre. Earlier this year, Aspiration co-founder Joseph Sanberg was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to defrauding investors and lenders of at least $248 million.
The Clippers released a letter from Ballmer's attorney David Kelley to Silver in which he described the investigation as “a witch hunt” and the subsequent penalties as a “gross injustice.”
Kelley accused Silver of not keeping his promises that the investigation would be governed by due process and fundamental fairness as well as the burden being on the league to prove any violations through evidence.
“League counsel has acknowledged in our discussions that the league does not believe there was an agreement between the Clippers and Aspiration to funnel money to Kawhi Leonard. League counsel also agreed with the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a federal judge that Mr. Ballmer was a victim of Joe Sanberg’s fraud — not a participant,” wrote Kelley, a partner in the firm O'Melveny and Myers.
