It's not uncommon for a professional athlete's performance to be negatively affected by something outside their job.
That's why it makes perfect sense that Kawhi Leonard is playing some of his best basketball with the Los Angeles Clippers right now. If there's anyone who could remain totally unbothered by being mentioned in what might become one of the NBA's biggest off-court scandals, it's Leonard - one of the league's most inscrutable superstars.
A case of alleged salary-cap circumvention that could have profound impacts on the Clippers and their extraordinarily wealthy owner, Steve Ballmer? Meh. Kawhi's just here to play ball.
Yet Leonard's stellar play is significant not only for propelling Los Angeles into playoff contention but also for refocusing the spotlight back on what commissioner Adam Silver will do with the Leonard case. It was one thing when the Clippers were NBA also-rans who started the season 6-21. But it's something else entirely when they've been one of the league's hottest teams since December. And Leonard is proving most nights why an organization might have been willing to bend the rules to keep him happy.
If you're unfamiliar with the details of the alleged scandal, a quick refresher: Leonard signed a huge endorsement deal with the now-defunct Aspiration right around the time he extended his massive contract with the Clippers in 2022. Ballmer became an investor in Aspiration, and the company became a sponsor of the basketball team.
Leonard reportedly did no endorsement work at all for Aspiration as part of his $28-million deal with the company, which, of course, is the point of a celebrity sponsorship: they have to say nice things about the company.
That alone was enough to raise questions about whether the Aspiration contract was really just a way to get Leonard some extra money that wouldn't come directly from the Clippers and therefore wouldn't count against the team's salary cap.
(The Clippers deny that there was any wrongdoing.)
When journalist Pablo Torre revealed all of this on his podcast, "Pablo Torre Finds Out," before the NBA season began, Silver said he took the allegations seriously and handed things over to an outside law firm to investigate.
That's what organizations do when they want to lower the temperature a little with a blooming scandal: Say that someone else is looking into it and that you can't comment further until the investigation is complete. In this case, it also helped that the Clippers stunk. No one is getting too worked up over allegations of cheating when your team is dealing away Paul George and then James Harden, effectively abandoning the Kawhi-led superteam that had been the goal since the summer of 2019.
However, a few things have happened in the months since. The law firm's investigation has moved slowly enough that the NBA All-Star Weekend, hosted by the Clippers, came and went last month with Silver able to say that he was just sitting back and awaiting the firm's findings.
That firm, by the way, is Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, which the league often asks to handle significant matters. Previous NBA investigations involving the New York-based firm include those into Tim Donaghy, Donald Sterling, and Robert Sarver. Notably, the latter two cases ultimately led to new owners taking over the Clippers and the Phoenix Suns.
Torre, meanwhile, has continued his own investigations, and his podcast series on the story now stretches to nine episodes. Most installments feature detailed documentation of the relationships between the Clippers, Aspiration, and Leonard.
Without getting into all of those details, the best-case scenario for the Clippers is that ownership happened to send tens of millions of dollars to Aspiration while Aspiration was sending Leonard millions of dollars - all by sheer coincidence. Is that possible? Sure. Is it plausible? Hmm.
And as this investigation continued, the Clippers went on to become good again.
Leonard is averaging more than 28 points per game, a career high. More importantly, at 34, he's been largely healthy, missing only significant time during two weeks in November. He's even played both ends of back-to-backs on occasion, a startling development for someone whose leg issues once raised serious concerns about his longevity.
Leonard has dragged the Clippers solidly into the play-in tournament mix, with them now sitting eighth in the West. This makes it at least possible that they could end up the 8-seed and face Oklahoma City in the first round. Fittingly, it was the Thunder who sent Los Angeles on its Kawhi-led journey, trading Paul George to the Clippers (in exchange for a monster haul) so that Leonard would have another superstar alongside him.
By this point in the season, we can conclude that Silver is not eager to hand out harsh punishment to the Clippers or Ballmer - or he likely would have done so already. But the brilliant play of Leonard, ironically, is only making it that much harder for the commissioner to let the whole thing fade away quietly.
In other words, Silver could have saved himself some trouble if he had acted back when the Clippers were 6-21.
Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.
