NBA suspends Clippers owner Ballmer for one year in Kawhi Leonard salary cap probe

BREAKING: NBA suspends Clippers owner Steve Ballmer for one year, fines the team $30 million and strips five first-round draft picks in the Kawhi Leonard salary cap probe.

The NBA just banned its richest owner for a year.

Steve Ballmer, the Clippers owner worth over a hundred billion dollars, suspended for twelve months over the Kawhi Leonard salary cap scandal. His team gets fined thirty million and loses five first-round picks, one every year from 2029 through 2033. That's half a decade of drafts, gone.

Commissioner Adam Silver called it flagrant violations and institutional failures. The league says Ballmer knowingly approved a business deal with a company called Aspiration, and he knew it was the price of Leonard's endorsement money. Leonard himself pays seven hundred thousand dollars for pressuring the team and not repaying personal expenses the Clippers covered.

Two executives went down with him, business president Gillian Zucker for a year, partly for misleading investigators, and Lawrence Frank for six months. Plus five years of league monitoring.

Ballmer paid two billion for this team. For the next year, he can't even run it.

This is Liu Yang, reporting for HIT.