We Uncovered Kawhi's OTHER Hidden Clippers Deal

EPISODE 417: "Seemingly impossible aspirations."

If you haven’t listened to this episode yet…

I strongly encourage you to stop reading this newsletter and press play, before going any further.

Both because this story — Part 13 (!) of our ongoing series into the Clippers and Kawhi Leonard — is one of my favorites that we’ve ever reported on the show. And also because I’m about to bullet-point a few of the newsier takeaways, in case anyone needs to consult a written record in the future (absent the structure we painstakingly set up, for Amin Elhassan, in the episode itself)…

SPOILER ALERT:

In this episode, sources tell us about Kawhi Leonard’s hidden, multi-million-dollar “sponsorship” deal with the Clippers’ scoreboard manufacturer at Intuit Dome. The sources — in addition to our investigation’s encounters with South Dakota-based Daktronics and its crisis-communications firm — directly tie allegations of salary-cap circumvention with a second team partner beyond Aspiration, representing an important public development amidst the NBA’s own inquiry.

For instance:

• One of the high-level sources familiar with the relationship between the Clippers and Daktronics, who was under contract for the Clippers’ Intuit Dome project for years, goes on tape with us to say, “It was 1,000% a way to circumvent the salary cap.” The source adds: “People at Daktronics, people within the Clippers’ organization themselves, had told me about this multimillion-dollar deal with Kawhi and Daktronics — they’re not a company that you would see a celebrity endorser for — that it wasn’t coming out of their end, that the Clippers were technically kind of funding it, and that it was funneling money from the Clippers through Daktronics back to Kawhi.”

• Another source — a former high-level Clippers official — tells us: “I know Kawhi had a sponsorship with Daktronics.” (The Athletic recently reported that the NBA’s inquiry had expanded to examine a Leonard endorsement deal with another company but did not include further details.)

• Hunterbrook Media’s Sam Koppelman, who has previously collaborated with PTFO on episodes about the owners of the Phoenix Suns and Memphis Grizzlies (as well as Phil Mickelson and athlete brainwaves), encounters a crisis-communications firm hired by Daktronics that says, “Daktronics doesn’t have a deal with Kawhi right now.” When pressed, the firm voluntarily brought up the NBA’s inquiry but did not share any examples of services Leonard may have provided for its client. (We also cite three sources who told us that the firm’s founder worked for Clippers owner Steve Ballmer during a controversy over the arena’s buildout, which led the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office to rebuke an LLC registered to Ballmer for being “used intentionally to obfuscate the identity” of the richest owner in American sports.)

• Daktronics has no public history of using celebrity endorsers. The company writes in annual reports: “Other competitors use sponsorships as a way to win business.” As one former Daktronics employee tells PTFO and Hunterbrook: “I remember asking early on why we didn’t do more traditional advertising and promotion to increase brand recognition. I was told since it’s B2B and not a consumer product, it didn’t make sense to advertise that way.“

In other words: more to come.

Aspirationally,

Pablo

P.S. You can now watch us over on Apple Podcasts (!)