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Trium Publishing House
The Introduction
By the spring of 2020, the discipline a December training session was meant to instill had already begun to erode — not from indifference to the rule, but from a demand the rule was never built to survive. Kawhi Leonard’s uncle and business manager, Dennis Robertson, had been pressing the Clippers for off-court income since within months of Leonard’s 2019 signing. His figure was specific: roughly $10 million a year, communicated mostly to Lawrence Frank, but also directly to Steve Ballmer and Gillian Zucker. No one told him to stop. No one reported the demand to the league, as the rules the Clippers had just been trained on required.
The Pressure Point
The NBA shut down in March 2020 as COVID-19 spread. In the stillness of that pause, Robertson’s frustration sharpened. In an April call, he complained to Ballmer that Zucker was making introductions for what he considered worthless arrangements, and made clear he was no longer willing to wait. Ballmer’s response, according to contemporaneous notes kept by Frank, framed the entire organization as working collectively toward Leonard’s financial goals. Zucker assured Robertson that Ballmer would follow through. Robertson pressed further still — he wanted a plan with a three-to-six month timeline, and a list of five or six companies already in the pipeline for potential introductions.
That is a demand with a due date attached. And the Clippers met it.
Six Days in June
In early June 2020, within the window Robertson had specified, Zucker sent a series of emails connecting Robertson to executives at three separate companies: Boingo Wireless, a communications infrastructure provider; Daktronics, a scoreboard and video-display manufacturer; and Lockton, an insurance brokerage. All three emails went out within a six-day span. All three were written the same way — each described the connection as being made in response to a request from that company for an introduction to Leonard.
No documentary evidence supports that framing. In the case of at least one company, the evidence available to investigators directly contradicts it. Zucker herself told investigators she could not recall, with any specificity, what had prompted her to write the emails at all. And the coincidence required to take the emails at face value is a steep one: three separate companies, independently deciding within days of each other that they wanted to be introduced to the same player, during a league-wide shutdown, with no season being played and no games for Leonard to be seen in.
The Vehicle, Filed Early
The clearest evidence that these were not genuine responses to outside interest sits in a filing date. On June 9, 2020 — the same day Zucker sent the second of the three introduction emails, three days after the first, and before the third had even gone out — the articles of organization for a new company, KL2 LBS LLC, were filed. Its members were Leonard and Robertson. This entity would go on to become the counterparty for all three of the endorsement agreements that followed.
Set the timeline next to itself. Before any of the three companies could plausibly have had a conversation with Leonard or his representatives. Before there was, on the record, any negotiation to speak of. Leonard’s side had already built the legal structure to receive the money.
An introduction email is supposed to be the first move in a relationship whose outcome isn’t yet known. Here, the entity meant to collect the proceeds existed before two of the three introductions had even been sent. What follows in Post III is how those three companies were brought to the table — and what each of them got from the Clippers in return.
