Pablo Torre Sounds Off on the NBA’s Historic Ruling Against the Clippers, Kawhi Leonard and ESPN — and Teases His Next Big Sports Investigation

Back in July, Variety spoke with the trailblazing sports journalist about “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” his engrossing podcast, a mélange of chat show and true-crime docuseries wherein Torre breadcrumbs investigative reporting to his pals, and its monthslong, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into how the Los Angeles Clippers were alleged to have circumvented the NBA salary cap by having its star player, Kawhi Leonard, receive a $28 no-show endorsement deal from Aspiration, whose co-founder was recently sentenced to 14 years in prison for defrauding investors (Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, the richest owner in the league, among them).

Ballmer had repeatedly — and vehemently — denied any involvement in the salary cap-circumvention scheme, and Torre had received a barrage of public criticism for his in-depth reporting from the likes of Ballmer’s billionaire pal (and former NBA owner) Mark Cuban and former NBA player turned podcaster Ty Lawson. His reporting was even undermined by his former employer, ESPN, in an Aug. 17 story by reporters Don Van Natta Jr., Baxter Holmes and Ramona Shelburne, under the headline, “Sources: NBA has no evidence Ballmer funneled money to Leonard via sponsors,” and the news site Puck, whose writers Dylan Byers and Peter Hamby accused Torre of chasing “clout and clicks and building your audience.”  

But on Sept. 2, the NBA handed down its punishment, and it was historic (translation: the biggest penalty levied against a team in league history):

• The Clippers will lose five first-round picks, in 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032 and 2033.
• The Clippers will be fined $30 million.
• Clippers owner Steve Ballmer will be suspended for one year “for knowingly seeking to help Mr. Leonard obtain off-court income opportunities.”
• Leonard’s uncle, Dennis Robertson, is banned from engaging with NBA teams for five years.
• Clippers president Laurence Frank will be suspended for six months, while Clippers president of business operations Gillian Zucker is suspended for one year.
• Leonard will be fined $700,000, despite pocketing tens of millions from the deal, and not suspended.

The NBA, who’d hired the law firm Wachtell Lipton to conduct an independent investigation into the Clippers/Leonard saga, found that the Clippers had “committed multiple significant rules violations” and that Leonard, via his uncle, Dennis Robertson, had compelled the Clippers “to assist him in obtaining off-court income opportunities, successfully obtaining those opportunities, and failing to reimburse payments by the Clippers for personal expenses.”

Leonard released a statement saying, in part, “I accept full responsibility for the lapses in judgment by people within my inner circle,” while NBA commissioner Adam Silver said, “I am deeply disappointed by the flagrant violations of our rules and by the Clippers’ institutional and leadership failures that led to this misconduct. The severity of the penalties reflects the seriousness of the violations.” Ballmer, for his part, released his own statement accusing the NBA of “a heavily biased investigation” and adding they are “exploring every legal remedy to address this gross injustice.”

Variety caught up with Torre to ask him how he feels about everything from the NBA’s ruling (and Leonard’s slap on the wrist) to ESPN and Puck throwing him under the bus.

Do you feel vindicated?

Oh man. Hmm… On some level it’s hard to resist the feeling of vindication but truly, my perspective on all of this is that journalism does not exist to be validated by the entity it investigates or by the awards it receives, as much as I welcome and deeply appreciate both. I just think it’s a dangerous game for me to play when the only way you can trust a multi-part, monthslong, deeply vetted, obsessively researched series is if the person you investigate has to say, “You know what? This podcaster had a point.” I don’t expect that, but it’s so amazing to have a plot twist in which I get to say any of this.

It says a lot that your work was deeply reported and won a Pulitzer Prize, yet a good portion of the public chose to side with the billionaire and the superstar.

It was, for that reason, both vindicating and the opposite. I don’t want that to be the standard. I think it’s good that people have high standards, but the way to assess that is by assessing the work on its own merits. What I’m heartened by is for the people who did take the time to listen — or watch — and really followed the story, there was no ambiguity about what this was.

I wanted to talk to you about ESPN’s report on Aug. 17 that claimed the “NBA has no evidence Ballmer funneled money to Leonard via sponsors.” This is your former employer — that rather coldly showed you the door — releasing a story which seems to be pro-Clippers/Ballmer propaganda and undermined your reporting. I’m sure that made your life hell the last couple of weeks and appears to be the opposite of what journalism should strive to be.

My experience with that report was… not great. It was a sign of the power of a mainstream media entity, and the question I always had with this reporting I’ve been doing for a year — which they were not — was why they felt comfortable framing the story that way; and why they never called me before they published it if they were going to frame it that way; and why, after I provided a statement after it published, after being told that they would include it, they never included it? And the statement, to paraphrase it, was simply: “We stand by our reporting. We look forward to the NBA’s ruling. And our investigation continues.”

What my own reporting suggests is that the Clippers and a crisis PR manager hired by Steve Ballmer were shopping around a story that would be their best chance at telling a version of events that would be helpful to a man — who we now understand, based on the NBA’s investigation, as well as my own — to have repeatedly lied about what really happened. In retrospect, what seems to be the case is that the Clippers fed ESPN information — that the NBA immediately refuted — that deeply resembles the exact press release that the Clippers released almost concurrently with the story. So, it’s not exactly a mystery as to where the information came from, but it is a mystery as to why ESPN presumably consumed at least some of the work we had done over the last year and said to themselves, “This framing of events feels more credible than the former employee we all know who’s provided multiple episodes backed by human sources as well as documentary evidence in which there is no alternate rational explanation for anything that happened other than the thing that he’s been saying for a year.”

I also wanted to ask you about the Puck report from Dylan Byers and Peter Hamby which basically accused you of clout-chasing and read like character assassination.

This was the work of people who had seemingly no real interest in even consuming the work I’d put out but felt very comfortable attacking my personal standards and credibility as if they had. That felt darkly poetic, in a way, that I would be lectured about proper journalistic standards by apparently a publication that sought to resemble none of them. And personally, I found it confusing and I just think they knew better — or should have — and I don’t think I care to investigate the difference at this point. Whose angle was it? And why did they come up with it? It was either incompetence or malice, and at this point I think there’s an increasingly vanishing distinction. It felt strangely personal. It did.

Well, you did receive public apologies from Mark Cuban and Ty Lawson.

And I loved both of those — and the way they came. They’re deeply appreciated.

Let’s talk about the historic penalty against the Clippers that your reporting compelled: A $30 million fine, five first-round draft picks, a year-long suspension for Steve Ballmer and yet only a $700,000 fine and no suspension for Kawhi Leonard. It seems like Leonard was let off the hook with a tiny fine, compared to the tens of millions he pocketed, and gets to leave the country and be traded to the Toronto Raptors.

One of the reasons I think it’s really important not to evaluate journalism based on an outside counsel’s ruling is that sometimes there are negotiations that happen for reasons beyond a reflection of what the truth actually is, and this is a prime case study. Kawhi Leonard, in all the evidence we assembled — and the NBA assembled — was given a slap on the wrist, by that evidentiary standard, but we realize why it happened. According to my reporting, this was a choice that the NBA made in order to take away from the proceedings one of the main options that Steve Ballmer had to make this whole story even messier for the league and his partners, which was arbitration. By giving Kawhi Leonard a slap on the wrist, according to my reporting, the union and Kawhi both agreed to settle; and by settling, they removed arbitration as an option. And so, when Steve Ballmer is punished with this historic punishment, the only move he has is to not take the arbitration — which he mistakenly assumed he still had — but to actually take everybody to court and sue the NBA, the commissioner, Wachtell Lipton, me and whoever he wants. That’s a legal strategy that the league made that is not the same thing as telling you what really happened, and what culpability everybody actually had in terms of what has been alleged.

What did you make of Leonard’s statement which read, in part: “Integrity and respect for this game are fundamental to who I am. I accept full responsibility for the lapses in judgment by people within my inner circle and regret the distraction this situation has caused the fans and my family.” That certainly doesn’t sound like accepting “full responsibility” to me.

Kawhi Leonard is an adult. He is a 35-year-old man who was in meetings with all of these teams, and was aware of what his uncle was requesting, and we have documents where his literal signature is in sections that attest to his knowledge and consent to the deals that he is saying he was effectively totally unaware of. By my own collection of documents, it doesn’t make sense to me. But in terms of why he said it, I understand. He’s basically getting to say, “I’m out, this wasn’t great, I regret some things, see you in Toronto.” And the whole story is about a guy that Steve Ballmer wanted so badly that he did not realize the ways in which he, Steve Ballmer, was leaving himself vulnerable to a divergence of self-interest that manifested in the outcome of this entire story.

I know we’ve already discussed this but just so we’re clear: You are not investigating the New York Knicks or Jalen Brunson, correct?

They are not a target. At the moment I’m absolutely not focusing on the Knicks or Jalen Brunson.

But you did just tease an investigation into Mark Walter, the owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, that will be dropping on your pod tomorrow. Walter, of course, is under federal investigation over $21 billion in undisclosed loans made by two insurance companies he owns, and who recently sold the Lakers to Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner, brother to the president’s son-in-law, for $12.5 billion. Can you tell me more about that?

Tomorrow — Friday — we have part one of an investigation that also involves federal agencies, also involves the public interest, also involves Hall of Fame basketball players, also involves a team in Los Angeles, also involves a baseball team in Los Angeles, and we’re trying to make something that seems very complicated, once again, something that people realize is not only a lot simpler than they might think, but is also deeply relevant to their interests as the public is concerned. I hope people give it time and sit through it.

How much does this go into Walter’s sale of the Lakers to Iger and Kushner?

This is part one, and so certainly part of the impetus was the sale of the Lakers to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner, but we hope to tell the story as the reporting comes in. This is not a one-and-done where everything is in here, but this is our way in. I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, as it hasn’t come out yet, but I do want to say that we’ve spent months thinking about this and really accelerated the reporting in the last couple of weeks.