re: Hmm did Balmer pay Kawhi under the table to get him to sign as a FA in 2019?

Everything about ASPIRATION seemed like a giant Ponzi scheme.

The biggest perk of the Aspiration Mastercard:

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Aspiration Impact Measurement (AIM), which examines 75,000 data points and shows scores for companies where Aspiration customers shop, based on how those companies treat people and the planet. Each Aspiration customer is also given a personal AIM score based on their purchasing behavior.

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New Pablo episode dropped with Mark Cuban.

Good back and forth between the two.

The Aspirarion company itself is insane and highlights how stupid these corporate ESG initiatives are

basically Cubans position is that it is illogical that ballmer would knowingly do this considering the risk to his organization if it were found out, and the the scammers signed a side deal with Leonard and uncle Dennis to keep ballmer on their side in order to enable the success of the scam, because the clippers and ballmer gave them credibility and the deal benefited them not the clippers.

personally I think it is unlikely that nobody in a power position with the clippers knew about this. It would have come up, a conversation would have happened in some context. And if that’s true, it is a stretch to think that ballmer would not have been told.

Cubans other point is that if he did know, and he did orchestrate this deal, he would have immediately paid off uncle Dennis as soon as the aspiration scam started to unravel…he points out correctly that ballmer probably has seven million in his wallet (paraphrasing)

It’s a good listen

also ballmers entire case on ESPN last night was “I didn’t know”, which may not be good enough. Recall relative to Cuban and the mavs and their workplace harassment scandal that that’s exactly the position Cuban took, and the team still got penalized

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also ballmers entire case on ESPN last night was “I didn’t know”

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This dude interviewed with ESPN last night?
Can't believe lawyers would let him do that so soon

at some point there has to be a risk/reward assessment.

cuban's case is that the risk was far too great, considering the NBA's stance on cap circumvention and ballmer's own recent issues with it (the deandre jordan fine). torre counters that the reward was literally everything ballmer wanted/needed (a star player in his prime), and that the jordan incident illustrates a pattern of behavior by the most powerful and wealthy man in the NBA, who "got what he wanted" by taking this risk.

both are speculation. torre's position is that the evidence leads him there, and cuban's position is regardless, there is a line you do not cross

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one thing to keep in mind is that wherever the burden of proof winds up falling, and whatever the threshold for unallowable conduct winds up being, it is the NBA that will decide it, not any judge or grand jury. there will be no trial, no cross examination under oath, no threat of perjury, etc.

if the NBA decides that ballmer did this to circumvent the cap, then that's that. if they don't, well that's that too

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Yep, which is why I think Cuban made the good point that Uncle Dennis is a genius in all of this, if he is the one who orchestrated it all, because the NBA can't really do anything to him.

It would be 20 pages deep if it was an actual relevant franchise.

This could be the biggest nba scandal in decades

has RDA been vidicated?