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The Spend-Back
None of the three companies — Boingo Wireless, Daktronics, Lockton — had a commercial relationship with the Clippers in early June 2020, when Gillian Zucker sent her introduction emails. Within weeks, all three did. And within roughly a month of those introductions, Kawhi Leonard had signed multi-year endorsement agreements with each of them, worth $18 million combined, all of it paid out by August 2021. The question investigators kept returning to was the obvious one: why would three companies with no prior interest in athlete endorsement suddenly commit millions of dollars to a player none of them had ever expressed interest in before?
The answer sits in what each company got back.
A Shared Signature
Set side by side, the three agreements share characteristics that have nothing to do with basketball and everything to do with structure. Each was signed in the depths of a pandemic, when companies were rarely entering into endorsement deals with athletes they had no prior relationship with. Each company had never signed an endorsement agreement of comparable size before, and none has since. Each imposed minimal performance obligations relative to the money involved. None of the three deals was ever publicly announced — which defeats the entire commercial purpose of an endorsement, since the point is to be seen benefiting from the association. And across all three, the confirmed activity Leonard performed amounted to a single visit to a military base under one agreement and some signed memorabilia under another. Nothing resembling a real endorsement campaign occurred, because a real endorsement campaign was never the point.
The Daktronics Blueprint
Daktronics offers the cleanest window into the mechanism because the record around it is the most explicit. In the spring of 2020, Daktronics was competing, through a request-for-proposal process the Clippers themselves had initiated, for the contract to supply scoreboard and video-display technology at the team’s new arena, the Intuit Dome. In May 2020, the Clippers told Daktronics it was their preferred vendor — but wanted a “spend back” arrangement, in which Daktronics would return some portion of that business value to the Clippers. Daktronics told investigators such arrangements aren’t unusual in its industry. Zucker then suggested a specific form for it: an endorsement agreement between Daktronics and Leonard.
Daktronics understood the stakes. Declining to sign Leonard could put the Intuit Dome contract at risk. Later that same month, a senior Clippers executive told a senior Daktronics executive, directly, what the endorsement should pay Leonard: $3 million a year, for two years. Daktronics agreed, and on July 6, 2020, signed the deal — not because it had identified Leonard as a valuable endorser, but because the number fell within what it considered a reasonable cost of doing business with the team.
The arrangement didn’t stay fixed. In February 2021, the same Clippers executive came back: the team had decided to spend more on the scoreboard itself, so Daktronics should pay Leonard more too. After negotiating — again under the shadow of its Intuit Dome relationship — Daktronics agreed to add $2 million to the second year’s payment, formalized in a May 2021 amendment. The push to increase Leonard’s money did not originate with Daktronics at any point. It came from the Clippers, twice, on a schedule the Clippers controlled.
Not Arm’s Length to Begin With
Two of the three deals ran through relationships that predate any of this. At one company, Zucker’s husband chaired the board during the relevant period, and she separately had a thirty-year working relationship with that company’s CEO. At another, she had a longstanding relationship with the company president who ultimately signed the endorsement agreement — a person she had recommended to an internal Clippers colleague in terms that had nothing to do with basketball and everything to do with personal familiarity.
A former executive at one of the three companies went further in describing what the resulting consulting agreement with the Clippers actually looked like from the inside: the company wasn’t in the consulting business; the services being purchased were the kind normally thrown in for free alongside other work; and receiving nearly the entire fee up front, before any service was rendered, was atypical in the extreme. Two of the three companies did in fact receive $10 million consulting payments up front, before their endorsement agreements with Leonard were even signed. The third received its first $2 million payment one day after making its first payment to Leonard.
Investigators go one step further still, on a thread they say is not yet fully corroborated: a witness with direct knowledge told them that at least one of these consulting agreements wasn’t really a consulting agreement at all — that it was constructed specifically as a vehicle to pass Clippers money through to Leonard, with the company willing to participate because of a promised, much larger contract still to come. If that holds up, the spend-back wasn’t just leverage the Clippers used to induce someone else’s money. It was the team’s own money, laundered through a third party’s books on its way to a player it wasn’t allowed to pay directly.
Aspiration Partners, the fourth company in this pattern, took the mechanism somewhere Daktronics, Boingo, and Lockton never did — and Zucker’s fingerprints on that deal go well past a suggestion made in passing. That’s Post IV.
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