writing

WIN-BANYAMA | 2025-11-01

Happy November to those who celebrate. It just so happens that this weekend doubles as the days of the dead, or of all the Saints, depending on how and who you count. Two weeks ago, larger-than-life American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer D’Angelo moved on unexpectedly. Absolutely devastating. May the Lord rest his soul while he’s up there, we’ll take good care of his music down here.

October felt like it flew by like a 2025 Chicago Bull fast break, and there’s a lot to catch up on. Nasir Jones’s iconic Mass Appeal record label’s ‘Legend Has It…’ series cracked on fiercely, with highly-anticipated drops from Mobb Deep (Infinite) and the improbable exhuming of a patched-together compilation-mixtape by the prematurely disappeared Harlemite Big L (Harlem’s Finest: Return of the King)—hands down one of the most influential and resonant MCs ever to grace the genre. Not legend, but rumor has that this very in-house editorial team is working on the definitive ‘Legend Has It…’ Tier List once all seven projects have dropped later in the year. Another thing that happened this past month is the somewhat unexpected happenstance of a potential true spiritual successor to Frank Ocean‘s Blonde: Daniel Ceasar’s Son of Spergy—out a week ago on 24th October—has all the chops, vibes, and moods that faithfully recall the 2016 Neo soul masterpiece. Shoutout D’Angelo once again. Mostly though, October’s very own passing means that the official 2025-2026 NBA season is now fully underway.

With most teams having churned out five to six games at the time of this writing, the one meteoric and proverbial sore thumb standing out from the pack hitherto is San Antonio Spurs’ French center/power forward/small forward/shooting guard/playmaker Victor Wembanyama. Currently just one of three still unbeaten teams in the league—sharing the spoils with reigning champs Oklahoma City Thunder and the other fortnightly Cinderella surprise, the Chicago Bulls—the Texan franchise puts everyone else behind them in terms of average points differential per game (+14.4), as well as average opponent points per game (103.8). News at eleven, ladies and gentlemen—when you have the most uniquely singular and impactful hooper of the 21st Century in your rank and file, listed at 7-foot-4 (225 cm), and therefore naturally leading the NBA in rebounds and blocks per game (shooting at a 56.3% whilst at that), those street creds sound like just any day ending in Y.

What’s particularly cool about the Spurs going 5-0 to begin the 2025-2026 season is that they have never done it before in franchise history. Not even the Tim Duncan-Tony Parker-Manu Ginobili-Kawhi Leonard San Antonio Spurs started their season 5-0. The club has won five NBA Championships though. Oh, and this new-found glory all comes after they had previously established a negative record by capitulating 16 straight times in 2023, only to then besting it the following season with as many as 18 straight losses. Also, for context, San Antonio lost at least five straight games on 11 occasions just in the past three years, boasting a 78-168 win/loss record par for the course during that same span. Nonetheless, they did manage to snatch Victor Wembanyama a couple years back. The rest is history still being written to this day: the unanimous first overall pick in the 2023 NBA Draft was, shockingly, named the 2024 NBA Rookie of the Year at the end of his first full season, finishing second for the Defensive Player of the Year award just behind French compatriot Rudy Gobert. Rightfully so, Wemby also became the first rookie ever to be named to the NBA All-Defensive First Team that same season.

Dude’s low-key being played in positions 1 through 5 on the floor, and is currently averaging almost eight more points per game than his career average (30.2 in five games this season, vs 22.9 all time), all the while putting up 56.2/31.2/79.1 shooting splits. We know there are literally just a handful observations in our sample, but what’s even gnarlier is that the French unicorn-meets-Alien is also cruising at better game averages in minutes played, field goal percentages, rebounds, blocks, steals, and turnovers conceded compared to his lifetime numbers so far. How does one even improve on career rebounding and blocks averages of 11 and 4, respectively?! Watch this: during the first three inaugural games this past month, Wemby was averaging 33.3 points, 13.7 rebounds, and 6.0 blocks every 48 minutes… Did we mention he’s 21-years of age?

Here it goes. If Wemby can stay healthy throughout the following eight months—he didn’t qualify for any accolade last season due to him not reaching the 65-games played threshold on account of a deep vein thrombosis—we’re anticipating a big sweep of his at this year’s individual NBA awards. This assessment should bode well for the San Antonio franchise, too. Aside from the athletic momentum they seem to have found, Mitch Johnson’s squad has some type of edge that no other team can claim this year: the emotional charge of honoring the work of record-setting, transcendental longtime head coach Gregg Popovich, who stepped down from his post after 29 consecutive years at the helm of the franchise due to worsening health issues this past May. The team appears in excellent managerial hands with Johnson, who had the privilege and honor to share gaffer duties bench with Coach Pop since 2019.

The Spurs might have found an additional improbable ally in the NBA fixtures schedule this month of November to keep this kind of wind in their sail, too. Of their upcoming fourteen opponents slated over the coming thirty days, only four teams are presently above .500: the Los Angeles Lakers, their fellow unbeaten Bulls, the Golden State Warriors (in a double header this month), and the 2023 NBA Champs Denver Nuggets. Thusly, it might not be completely out of the question that we would regroup this time around next month, and still find Wembanyama and friends in high altitude standings. This formulation is not meant as any type of shade to the Stephon Castles, Devin Vassels, Harrison Barnes, or Keldon Johnsons of the Spurs world. It’s just that this early season really does look like it put the Wemby church at the center of the Texan village. Take these first five match ups San Antonio has played so far: absent game two against the New Orleans Pelicans in which Luke Cornet grabbed one more board than him from the bench, the tall French glass of water was the team leader in both points and rebounds in each single face off. The Silver and Black are +23 points per 100 possessions with him on the floor, and a measly +0.1 with him on the bench. He’s that supreme.

And to think that the San Antonio Spurs’ highest-paid player, De’Aaron Fox, is still sidelined due to a right hamstring strain. His return should be imminent, however. Thing is, the 27-year-old former Sacramento Kings star might need to fight a little harder for ball handling duties once he comes back—Wemby is so omnipresent and position-less, and more often than not takes care of the rock from cradle-to-grave, with a few blocks and rebounds peppered on top for good measure. For Christ’s sake is this kid good. Not that anybody didn’t notice before, but this new season has made his impact and gravity absolutely undeniable. If you’re sick of this kind of generational talent already, then newsflash: the next couple decades are going to be tough for you. He’s poised to be one of the most influential players in NBA history.

Honestly, good luck to the Alamo City this year. God bless the San Antonio Spurs. But it’s New York Forever over here. Although we are still very much concerned about Josh Hart’s right index finger. Get that thing fixed before we’re too deep into the season, Tasmanian devil.

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

THE FILE OF PABLO | 2025-09-27

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