Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer said Sunday he will comply with the NBA’s historic penalties for salary-cap circumvention and will not take the league to court, reversing the franchise’s vow to fight what it had called a “witch hunt.”
The announcement, first reported by ESPN’s Shams Charania, ends two weeks of open confrontation between the NBA’s richest owner and Commissioner Adam Silver. Ballmer said the team has already paid its $30 million fine and is moving on, even while maintaining disagreements with the investigators’ findings.
“This has been a very difficult time for everybody associated with the Clippers, and for that, I have sincere regrets,” Ballmer said in a statement. “I want to apologize to our fans, employees, and my fellow NBA team owners for the distraction and distress this matter has caused, for which I accept responsibility as principal owner.”
He added: “We are committing to put this chapter behind us. We have communicated to the NBA that we are complying with the penalties assessed by the league, have paid the fine, and are moving forward. While there are still disagreements concerning the findings in the report, this is not where I want to focus. Team owners should support, not distract.”
Clippers owner Steve Ballmer is complying with the NBA's punishments of the franchise for salary cap circumvention, deciding not to pursue any legal action. Statement from Ballmer:
This has been a very difficult time for everybody associated with the Clippers, and for that, I…
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) September 14, 2026
The decision closes a public standoff that began Sept. 2, when the league released a yearlong report by Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz and handed down one of the stiffest punishments in NBA history.
The Clippers must forfeit first-round draft picks in 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032 and 2033 and pay a $30 million fine. Ballmer is suspended from all league and team activities for one year. President of business operations Gillian Zucker is suspended without pay for one year. President of basketball operations Lawrence Frank is suspended without pay for six months. The franchise is under a five-year league compliance-and-monitoring program.
Kawhi Leonard, the two-time Finals MVP at the center of the case, was fined $700,000 but not suspended. His uncle and former business manager, Dennis Robertson, was banned from NBA business for five years. Leonard’s pending trade to the Toronto Raptors was cleared to proceed after the ruling.
The league said the Clippers “affirmatively initiated” off-court income opportunities between Leonard and four companies that also did business with the team: Aspiration Partners, Boingo Wireless, Daktronics and Lockton Insurance. Investigators concluded Leonard received about $66 million in endorsement pay tied to those arrangements.
Silver called the violations “flagrant” and said the salary-cap system is “a fundamental component of the basketball competition that the league oversees for the benefit of the teams and players and ultimately the fans.”
Hours after the penalties were announced, the Clippers issued a blistering response. The team said it “vehemently reject[ed] the NBA’s findings,” called the investigation “heavily biased,” and pledged to “vigorously challenge these findings and penalties through every avenue available.” Attorney David N. Kelley of O’Melveny & Myers, writing to Silver, labeled the probe a “witch hunt” and a “gross injustice.” Kelley said Ballmer had spent nearly $50 million on investigation-related legal costs and that the owner’s reputation had been “irreparably damaged.”
League bylaws treat Silver’s ruling as final. There is no internal arbitration for owner discipline or cap-circumvention findings, leaving a federal lawsuit as Ballmer’s main remaining option. Legal analysts said such a case would have been an uphill fight: the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association both treated the penalties as binding, and courts historically defer to leagues on internal discipline.
The legal climate also shifted after Sept. 10, when The New York Times reported that the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn had opened a criminal investigation into the Clippers’ dealings with Leonard. Prosecutors have issued at least one subpoena. The inquiry is in its early stages, and it is unclear whether it will produce charges. Spokesmen for the Clippers, the NBA and the U.S. attorney’s office have not publicly detailed cooperation.
The scandal began Sept. 3, 2025, when the podcast “Pablo Torre Finds Out” reported that Leonard had a no-show endorsement contract with Aspiration, a climate-focused financial firm that later filed for bankruptcy. Aspiration co-founder Joseph Sanberg pleaded guilty to fraud and was sentenced to 14 years in prison in a separate $248 million investor scheme. Ballmer invested about $60 million in Aspiration and the Clippers signed a large sponsorship with the company. Ballmer has said he was “conned” by Sanberg and did not know of any scheme to pay Leonard off the books.
The Wachtell report went further than the original Aspiration story. It said Zucker initiated or facilitated deals with all four companies, in some cases drafting emails that made it appear the businesses had approached Leonard. The report said Ballmer “knowingly sought to help Mr. Leonard obtain off-court income opportunities” and approved a business deal he knew was a precondition for Aspiration’s endorsement of Leonard. Zucker was described as “primarily and directly culpable” and was found to have given false and misleading statements to investigators.
The draft-pick penalty is especially severe in the NBA’s second-apron era, when future first-rounders are both a source of cheap talent and the main currency in trades. Combined with picks the Clippers previously sent out to assemble the Leonard-Paul George core, the franchise has now surrendered a decade’s worth of first-round capital around that era. The 2000 Minnesota Timberwolves case involving Joe Smith had been the prior high-water mark for cap-circumvention discipline; Silver’s package exceeds it in scale.
Ballmer bought the Clippers in 2014 for $2 billion after Donald Sterling was forced out following racist remarks. He later spent more than $2 billion on Intuit Dome in Inglewood, which opened in 2024 and is scheduled to host the 2026 NBA All-Star Game. Forbes has placed his net worth above $150 billion. The $30 million fine is the largest team fine in league history, but it is a rounding error against that fortune. The yearlong ban is the more personal blow: Ballmer, one of the league’s most visible owners, cannot attend games, sit on the Board of Governors or take part in team operations.
