Posts
Trium Publishing House
The Circumvention Instrument
Every enforcement regime contains, inside its own language, a description of the violation it was built to anticipate. The National Basketball Association’s salary cap circumvention rules do not simply forbid teams from paying players more than their contracts allow. They describe, with almost uncomfortable precision, the exact shape a team would give to that payment if it tried to make one anyway — and they carve out, deliberately, the one narrow channel through which a legitimate business relationship between a team’s sponsor and a team’s player is still allowed to form. This is the story of an organization that knew precisely where that channel ran, had already been caught straying from it once, sat through a training session explaining exactly where its edges were, and crossed them again regardless.
What the Instrument Protects
The NBA’s salary cap exists to manufacture competitive balance among franchises with wildly unequal market sizes and ownership wealth. A hard ceiling on player compensation only accomplishes that if the ceiling is actually the ceiling — if there is no side channel through which a wealthier owner can quietly pay a player more than a smaller-market rival could ever match. The Collective Bargaining Agreement’s circumvention rules are the mechanism that keeps the ceiling real. They prohibit not just direct payments outside a player’s Uniform Player Contract, but any arrangement, promise, or understanding — between a team and a player, or the player’s representatives, relatives, or affiliates — that delivers compensation or business opportunity by another route.
The rules go further than prohibiting the transaction itself. They also prohibit merely attempting or soliciting one. And they draw a single, narrow exception: if an outside company independently approaches a team wanting to be introduced to a player, the team may supply contact information for the player or his agent. Nothing more. A team may not recommend a player to a sponsor. A team may not initiate an endorsement relationship on a player’s behalf. The league’s own internal training materials spell out both of these as textbook examples of prohibited conduct, in almost those exact words, distributed to every team, every year.
A Franchise That Already Knew
The Clippers did not encounter this rule for the first time in the events this series will examine. In 2015, while pursuing free agent center DeAndre Jordan, the organization facilitated an endorsement arrangement between Jordan and an incoming team sponsor. The league investigated, found a violation, and fined the team $250,000. Owner Steve Ballmer responded publicly at the time with an admission that reads, in retrospect, like a promise the organization did not keep: “We believed we were doing this the right way, and any circumvention was inadvertent.”
Four years later, the pattern resurfaced in a different form. During Kawhi Leonard’s 2019 free agency, his uncle and business manager, Dennis Robertson, made a series of requests to multiple interested teams that the CBA does not permit — equity stakes, private transportation, housing, guaranteed off-court income. Leonard signed with the Clippers regardless, and the league opened an inquiry into whether the team had agreed to accommodate those requests. The Clippers acknowledged Robertson had made the asks. They denied agreeing to any of them. The investigation was left open, pending further evidence, rather than closed.
The Second Warning
The Robertson controversy did not simply fade. It became the direct catalyst for a league-wide response: a formal “rules enforcement initiative,” adopted in the summer and fall of 2019, aimed at tightening awareness, compliance, and enforcement of the circumvention rules across every franchise. One new requirement stood out — teams were now obligated to report to the league office any improper solicitation made by a player or his representative, even one the team rejected outright, even one that never went anywhere.
The initiative also included a mandatory training session, conducted individually with each team’s senior leadership. On December 4, 2019 — in the same window of time as the conduct this series will trace — the league delivered that training directly to the Clippers. Steve Ballmer sat in the room. So did Gillian Zucker, the team’s president of business operations. So did Lawrence Frank, president of basketball operations. All three would later tell investigators, without hesitation, that they understood the rule correctly. All three would go on to be named, years later, as the individuals most responsible for breaking it.
That is the instrument as it existed going into 2020: a rule with a narrow, well-defined exception; a franchise fined once for stepping outside it; an open question hanging over that same franchise regarding the same player; and a training session, delivered in person, closing any possible gap in understanding. What the record shows happening next is the subject of Post II — a six-day span in June 2020 in which that exception was not stretched, but manufactured.
No comments:
Post a Comment