NBA-ийн мөрдлөг Лос Анжелес Клипперсийн эсрэг түүхэн шийтгэл оногдууллаа

On Sept. 3, 2025, Pablo Torre and his “Pablo Torre Finds Out” podcast team released an episode titled “Kawhi Leonard Signed a Secret $28M Deal. Steve Ballmer Funded a Fraud. We Followed the Money.”

It was the first of many episodes over the past year that reported on the complicated layers to the story around the relationship between the LA Clippers and Leonard, its star player.

Along the way, Torre and his team drew the ire of the Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer, the skepticism of Mark Cuban and Bill Simmons, the attention of millions of fans — and earned a Pulitzer Prize for his team’s efforts.

Almost exactly one year later, the NBA on Wednesday released its own investigative report by its white-shoe law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz essentially confirming Torre and his team’s initial reporting while levying a slate of punishments unprecedented in league history.

Thousands of people tuned in Wednesday evening for a live analysis from Torre and his co-hosts on YouTube. In a series of statements, the Clippers fumed. Cuban tweeted out “Congrats Pablo.”

The Athletic talked with Torre on Thursday evening about the league’s resolution, the reactions to his reporting and what’s next.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Right after the announcement, Mark Cuban — who had been a bit of an adversary over the past year — tweeted “Congrats Pablo.” About him and everyone else who weighed in over the past year, do you feel any sense of vindication?

I loved seeing that from Mark, because I loved talking to him. I have this sort of podcast brain disease, I guess, where my main thought was, “I wonder if you’d come back on the show.” So that was my first reaction.

My second thought was, I really hope that people don’t think that the only way that you can trust reporting like this is if the entity or the institution that you’re investigating takes their hand and raises it and says, ‘Yes, the journalist was right.’

But I also hope that people can evaluate the work on its merits and learn to trust that our process is rigorous in ways that are bordering on unhealthily obsessive, which is a separate problem, but hopefully one that they can trust.

Did anything genuinely surprise you in or about the NBA’s report?

I did not know that Lawrence Frank, the (Clippers) president of basketball, was contemporaneously taking notes that he shared with the NBA, and those notes were so helpful — and, at times quoting Steve Ballmer, his boss, directly in conversations with “Uncle Dennis” Robertson — that the NBA reduced the punishment on account of how helpful that information was. I had no idea how much the Clippers were providing the NBA. That’s the things that they would never provide me. I was really impressed by the detail that we got, even as I had questions about what was not in it.

Anything surprise you about the punishments themselves?

I am fundamentally not the type of person who assumes that a mountain of evidence leads to a mountain of a punishment, but by any historical standard, this was a mountain of a punishment. So the mere fact that there was accountability on this level was really eye-opening.

But when you proceed to read the actual report, you learn why. (The NBA) did not have a choice, based on even the limited scope that was published in this report. They didn’t have a choice but to levy a punishment of this size.

So, yes, Ballmer’s being banned from the building for a year, five first-round picks, a year suspension for Gillian Zucker, the head of business — I mean, these are all things that I did not take for granted. But when you read the report, you understand why that felt eminently justifiable.

You said near the start of your live stream Wednesday night, “This is not everything.” Directionally, what is the most intriguing question still left unanswered or thread unpulled?

What are the interests of the federal government? The Securities and Exchange Commission is now probing Daktronics, which is a public company. That is one of the four entities that partnered with the Clippers in this deeply elaborate cap-circumvention scheme. And the SEC has made requests for information that the CFO of Daktronics said on the earnings call this week, earlier on the same day that the NBA’s punishment was dropped. They said that they were taking it seriously and cooperating.

The federal government has powers that not even the NBA has. Certainly, I do not have the leverage that either of those entities has, in a couple of key ways. So if you are the SEC or the Department of Justice, and you see what this story was, as laid out on my show and as laid out in this punishment, this ruling and this 35-page report, what is interesting to you? And I think that is a question that we have only begun to answer.

What do you think the public appetite is for more on this?

The sensation that I have felt personally and have felt in our audience — such that I can get a sense of what has been a head-spinning day — is that people have been almost delighted that maybe we can hold the richest people in the world to something resembling a standard of accountability.

I think that is what I feel most acutely: That maybe that’s possible. That maybe a collection of documentary evidence and human sources who are brave enough to talk to a journalist, and months of research that have been vetted legally and otherwise, can combine to create something like consequences at a time at which those extraordinarily wealthy people seem to be able to avoid them.

I think that we have the ability to do something that the rest of our culture is yearning for, which is make people who are too rich to care about anything resembling the public interest worry that maybe they need to tell us the truth.

In some pretty incredible timing, the original episode that launched all of this was one year ago today. And it has been followed by so many additional episodes of reporting, not to mention a Pulitzer Prize. When you think back to that debut date and your expectations that day, in the arc of the year since, what components of the way this played out stand out to you as, “Yes, I saw that coming,” or, “Never would have imagined”?

There was a part of me that thought that this was going to be significantly less popular, less watched, less listened to than our Jordon Hudson series, because we’re talking about, on some level, like, NBA nerd s—.

They’re talking about cap circumvention and carbon credits and sort of arcane aspects of a collective bargaining agreement. And the fact that it spoke to people and grabbed them is a testament to, of course, the guests I’ve had on the show, who have been proxies for the audience: David Samson and Amin Elhassan, who have been fantastic ever since the start of this.

I think that I probably underestimated the appetite for stories that can be substantive, but also, in the execution of them, actually (are) fun for people that aren’t me and my friends.

Is there anything you wish you did differently over the course of the year?

When I get to sit down and review everything, months after the final episode has truly dropped, I’m sure that I will have a sense of what I missed, or underweighted, or really wish that I had done differently.

But in the moment, as we’re covering this thing live, I’m just really proud that one of the things that no one has been able to really do is show that we have gotten the story wrong.

I am open to various corrections and details and critiques. The show, as I need to keep saying, is not called “Pablo Torre Is Right.” The show is “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” and the whole point is that we show you our process, and you come along for the ride of what it is that we discovered. But it is not a show that is meant to be 100 percent perfect. And, therefore, you must trust us. It’s that we care enough about trying to get it right that we think we’re worth listening to.

And so I’m sure there are things that I’ll want to do over when we have full clarity of what really happened here, and all of its depth. But that’s not what comes to mind right now. I think the team that we have has made it so that what I’m most looking forward to is the next plot twist, as opposed to whether we could have predicted it.

If you could sit down with Steve Ballmer, and he had to answer one question from you with brutal candor, what would you ask?

What a great question that I’ve not contemplated, because he has said, so clearly, no.

I would ask him what he regrets the most. I would let him tell me what, of all the things that have been revealed that he has done that have led to what can only be, I imagine, a painful series of developments in his public life, I want to know what he regrets the most. I genuinely don’t know what he would say. And I would love to find out.

Last question: Do you really have no urge to have a little bit of triumphalism that you’ve clearly earned? This is one of the most validating things that could have happened. So if it’s not triumphalism, if it’s not vindication, what is the word to cover the moment you saw the report, read it and understood what was being said?

The word that comes to mind is delight.

It is not, to me, the triumphalism or spiking of the football that I am certainly tempted to do. But it is the enjoyment that people now realize why I’ve been behaving this way for a year, why I’ve stayed on this.

People have been saying for a very long time, ‘Why don’t you give it up already? What are you doing?’ And then it was, ‘Aren’t you embarrassed that you got this wrong?’ And then it was, ‘Why are you continuing to chase clout with your podcast?’ And I get why, on some level, all of those questions make sense.

But the delight I have is in the reveal that I hope people now see with more clarity than I could ever give them clearly. And it might be a clarity that only an institution can provide, an institution that has to raise its hand and say, actually this podcaster had a point.

It’s a delight of getting to watch people find out why I’ve been finding out. And that, to me, is a twist that I did not ever take for granted. And it’s one that I found incredibly delightful as I was listening and watching and scrolling, as people realized what I’ve been up to the whole time.

“Pablo Torre Finds Out” is produced by Meadowlark Media and became part of The Athletic Podcast Network last September through a licensing deal.