I feel like Pablo when I’m workin’ on my shoes
I feel like Pablo when I see me on the news
I feel like Pablo when I’m workin’ on my house

In heeding the above not-so-veiled reference, you’d be forgiven to assume we’re about to chop it up about some revisionist account on TLOP‘s iterative hell almost turning ten years old (can y’all believe it?). Yet, for better or worse, “No More Parties in LA“‘s contribution to this story probably starts and ends there. The Pablo who might be seeing himself on the news a lot lately, is of course not Paul the Apostle, but American journalist, sportswriter, and perhaps now most famously, podcaster Pablo Sison Torre. What began as a breaking news piece of distinctive investigative journalism on his Pablo Torre Finds Out earlier this month has led to a remarkable cascade of high-profile inquiries by and into everything from government agencies, sports franchises, as well as disgraced eco-friendly ‘green banks’. The start of the 2025-2026 NBA preseason is still a handful days away, but the North American professional basketball league might have already peaked their media monitoring for the year… Go Knicks, I guess?

What’s with all the fanfare, you may ask. Well, in so many words, the fact that a relatively unknown and low-profile podcaster singlehandedly architected a substantiated and pernickety investigation alleging that Los Angeles Clippers’ heavyweight player Kawhi Leonard benefitted from a multi-year, near-$50 million partnership agreement with a now defunct and disgraced climate-finance firm FKA Aspiration (later CTN Holdings). The arrangement was said to be functioning more like a “no-show” compensation than a true blue endorsement for the premier basketball franchise’s star.

There is quite a lot more to the Kawhi-gate than that—such as the whole ‘uncle Dennis Robertson’ angle usurping officially licensed agent Mitch Frankel—but the central linchpin of the whole shebang is that this piece of financial engineering was purported to have been masterminded by LA Clippers owner and corporate stage maniac Steve Ballmer (who happens to be world’s richest person involved with any sports team), in order to improperly advantage himself by remunerating his top franchise player with a compounded amount significantly higher than the NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement-regulated salary cap would have allowed him. The league’s salary cap threshold amounted to around $113 million during the 2021-22, the season tied to the impropriety in question. To put it bluntly, a gargantuan cheat.

Just to put this into perspective—on his latest podcast episode as part of the developing story, Torre made it clear that if the fraud scheme were all to be proven true, it would make for the largest salary cap circumvention in all of professional sports history. By orders of magnitude, in fact. Let that sink in for a moment. For Christ’s sake, the whole Los Angeleno franchise is alleged to have poured about $118 millions into brand partner Aspiration over the course of one and a half years (see PTFO timeline below). What is particularly uncanny in the chronological unfolding of events is the apparent pacing of the Ballmer scheme: the reported millions of dollars ‘invested’ in Aspiration by the LAC—inclusive of shallow and puffy equity-like purchases of Aspiration corporate carbon offset credits—all suspiciously took place in or around contract renewals and payment dates owed to Leonard (aaand his uncle Dennis), according to the endorsement deal documents. Torre understandably qualifies the hypothesis that those trails of money tranches were in fact laundered through Aspiration, in order to up Leonard’s total LAC compensation reward outside of the bounds of his team contract. And outside of the bounds of strict NBA regulation.

Naturally, this attracted the ire and sanitized press releases by a whole host of interested parties, all of them holding more or less stakes in this blow up. From Steve Ballmer himself to former Aspiration executive Andrei Cherny and NBA honcho Adam Silver (who called salary cap circumvention a ‘cardinal sin‘ in the league)—no one in hoopslandia seems to shut up about this. The NBA was forced to investigate soon after the Pablo’s reports started to circulate. Meanwhile, minority Dallas Mavericks-owner and angel-investor-next-door Mark Cuban was quick to hop on the court of public opinion’s bandwagon, challenge Pablo’s findings and side with ‘team Ballmer’. We wonder what on earth might he be benefitting from in adopting such a stance?

Moreover, in the above mentioned third PTFO episode installment on the Kawhi-gate series, Pablo underscored how his bombshell reporting and the ensuing investigations naturally infiltrated the September NBA Board of Governors meeting in New York, BIG TIME. How could it not. The sad, strange, beautiful irony in all of this? How about Steve Ballmer doubling as the Chair of the NBA’s Audit Committee on the Board of Governors, ergo the league’s own self-regulatory body furthering financial transparency across the thirty franchises. Ouch…

Aside from this potentially erupting as the biggest financial scandal of the modern NBA, this discursive dynamic holds a great deal of further analytical fascination, if you’re someone interested in media power structures like us. First of all—Pablo Torre didn’t ‘snitch‘ on anybody. Just like true blue investigative journalism once led the way, it took him countless hours of publicly available documents scrutiny and parsing all information with a fine tooth comb to begin to uncover certain laundering patterns. In a world succumbed to short-memory instant gratification inertia, this kind of journalism feels like a dying breed. His ability to construct a substantiated and believable conjecture of events, going after the eight richest man in the world, and leading to what is poised to become one of the most talked about fraud’s in professional sports history needed to overcome a thankless and gregarious job. This is no small feat. Where are all the award-winning ‘investigative’ newspapers of record when you needed them?

Bizarrely enough, although a number of legacy press outfits have saluted and given credit to the former Sports Illustrated and ESPN reporter, a loud majority of traditional sports media have failed to do so hitherto. Yes, they might have incorporated his unique piece of breaking news in their own circadian coverage rhythm, but their self-centered intake of such profitable story seemed to be more driven by skepticism than embrace. In fairness, some, like the Boston Sports Journal and the Toronto Star—not exactly top dogs in the press market—did add valuable and enriching reporting of their own to the developing narrative. What this act of dialectic reinforcement demonstrates is the underutilized power of decentralized and distributed investigative journalism, that when collectivized in solidarity such as in this Kawhi-gate can indeed hold giant power apparatuses to account.

Matter of fact; Pablo’s reporting was the kill. Regardless of the criminal and athletic outcomes from the various official ongoing investigations (we aren’t necessarily holding our breaths for their swiftness and justness anytime soon), we can’t imagine any regulatory agency carrying out a better job in advancing this type of circumstantial evidence to an adjudicating jury. If this piques your interest—and if you’ve read this far we’re going to assume so—do yourselves a favor and spend a few hours peeping the three episodes tracing the overall story timeline. They are worth it. Then arrive at your own conclusion.

For all intents and purposes, the jury is still very much out on this one. Yet, much like Pablo and his multiple featured guests have repeated several times on the podcast: what more evidence does one need to bring forward to overwhelmingly convince the court of public opinion that the LAC-Leonard-Aspiration farce triangle was a highfaluting scam? The NBA, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the SEC certainly thought it was enough… By the way, there is some cheeky someone who has remained awfully quiet throughout this whole time. Wanna guess? The notoriously stoic and taciturn Mr Kawhi Leonard himself, of course. ‘It’s (gr)apple time, (gr)apple time‘.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV