How Billionaires Call the Shots in the NBA (and America), with TrueHoop's Henry Abbott

In an era devoid of accountability for the Epstein class and sports owners (and in-between), Pablo finds a kindred spirit in the OG blogger turned ESPN insider turned fellow independent muckraker who's not afraid to call out the backroom dynamics of Adam Silver during wartime: If billionaires can't police themselves, does cheating matter? Do the people who run the sport... really love the sport? If there's no effort to be decent, where do the lies end? And if Steve Ballmer's already negotiating, what is his minimum viable punishment? • Previously on PTFO: Ballmer's Tree-Money, the Whistle-Blowers and the Document You've Been Waiting For https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjlhYjA0ODliNDllZWNjMGI3YjU1Mzhh • "Bron got me on sea bass" https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/15617204/lebron-james-dwyane-wade-friendship-enrages-nba • Subscribe to TrueHoop by Henry Abbott https://www.truehoop.com/ (Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic. The views, research and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, presented by eBay Live. I am Pablo Torre, and today you're going to find out what this sound is.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  I think transparency is critically important in the league. We try never to be a no-comment league, to answer people's questions, to explain as best we can, you know, why we do what we do.

• 0:19Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

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• 1:31Pablo Torre?

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• 2:13Pablo Torre?

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• 2:38Pablo Torre?

  I do want to clarify that you have no idea what I wanted to ask you about. Facts. Henry Abbott, thank you for doing this. It's good to see you, man. Great to see you. How's everything going? You know, it's a lot. Yeah. Part of the reason why I brought you here is because of what we did on this show, live, in front of a livestreamed, no-net audience, which I consider one of the most important developments in the entire story of the Clippers and Aspiration and Steve Ballmer and Kawhi Leonard and Uncle Dennis and Dennis Wong and this whole cast of characters. Because I was invited to give a, you know, to host a panel of some sort at Sloan, the Sports Analytics Conference, it's its 20th anniversary, and we presented documents and

• 3:21Pablo Torre?

  new reporting that no one had ever heard of before or seen. And one of them was a whistleblower complaint. And in that whistleblower complaint, which is filed by not one but two registered whistleblowers with the federal government, they told the SEC in writing, under penalty of perjury, that Aspiration and Steve Ballmer's Clippers were engaged in a capser convention scheme for Kawhi Leonard. It says it in the document that Amin Elhassan read.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  Of the $20 million that Aspiration drew from the escrow account, most was used to pay for carbon credits to satisfy other agreements, either for pass agreements with the Clippers or to satisfy agreements with other customers. And to pay for Aspiration's operating costs, and even to pay Clippers forward Kawhi Leonard an incentivized bonus to circumvent the NBA salary cap, disguised as an organic marketing sponsorship agreement. That's a smoking gun, ladies and gentlemen. That's emphasis added.

• 4:27Pablo Torre?

  And that document, crucially, was filed with the SEC in March of 2023. Like, over two years before I even started this whole investigation on this show. And so I don't even know what a smoking gun is by the NBA standards. I just know that this is proof, credible proof, that provided a roadmap for the federal government to prosecute the co-founder of Aspiration, Joe Sandberg, and convict him of wire fraud in federal court. The question I want to start with, though, to introduce you and to give a sense of why I wanted to talk to you today, after the reporting we did on Friday on this show.

• 5:11Pablo Torre?

  When did you first meet Adam Silver? Do you remember?

• 5:14Speaker 05

  Oh, I do remember. I do remember. I don't know the date. I'm terrible with dates. But, you know, I was newish, covering the NBA. I think I was running True Hoop, so that started in 2005, but maybe not yet at ESPN. So it was probably like 2006, 2007. And I knew who he was, obviously. He was the deputy commissioner, and he was very tall, looked a little bit like me.

• 5:35Pablo Torre?

  I wasn't gonna, I wasn't gonna say that that's why we brought you on, but it does help. If you're trying to imagine, Adam, just look at Henry and kind of squint a bit.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, he's taller than me and, um, well, anyway, let's not get sidetracked on how we look different. But, but there was some, you know, there's always another NBA media event, right? And I would, I would go to all the league-wide things. And there was something, I don't remember what it was, that we were in one location in Manhattan, like, a, a group of media and NBA officials. And then we walked down the street to another location for the next part of the deal. I'm sure it was some dumb NBA store thing or Board of Governors meeting or something. And on the walk, he walked over to me and he kind of like tapped me on the shoulder and, you know, he smiled and he was like, "Hey, I just want to say thank you for covering our league."

• 6:24Speaker 05

  And I'm like, boy, has that vibe changed. I'm gonna say it.

• 6:29Pablo Torre?

  I don't think NBA Commissioner Adam Silver would ever walk with Henry Abbott, founder of True Hoop, to a second location now. I think that era is probably long over.

• 6:40Speaker 05

  I honestly think, to be totally honest, I don't even think, I think we'd get along fine. Like, I think he's a good guy. I just think he's beholden to people who are bad, and he just has to do a job. He's like any lawyer, for any billionaire, right? Like, he just has to do what he has to do.

• 6:53Pablo Torre?

  You know, this is part of what's important for me to communicate to everybody, is that in the coverage that I do on this show of the NBA, and now Commissioner Adam Silver, and the coverage that you've been doing, it did not start from a place of, let's take this [bleep] thing down.

• 7:10Speaker 05

  No, man.

• 7:11Pablo Torre?

  So for people who don't know your origin story and like True Hoop, when you say it started in 2005, I just want to do the basic math, because that is also crazy, right? Like, you were the, genuinely, you were the original NBA blogger, correct? That's a fair thing to say?

• 7:29Speaker 05

  Skeets. J.E. Skeets was out there a little before.

• 7:32Pablo Torre?

  Is that right?

• 7:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:34Pablo Torre?

  Okay, so, ball don't lie, but Pablo Torre does. Excuse me, yeah.

• 7:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. No, respect to the Canadians, you know. I did some, I was trying to sort of Google at that time, you know, how many basketball blogs there were, and I believe True Hoop was, on the topic of basketball, the 12th blog in the world. And a lot of it was just, you know, born out of a deep, deep, abiding love of the game, right? And we're trying to understand this game better. And there was maybe a little bit also of, I had been working for magazines and was noticing, like, how annoying it was. Like, I think the first post in True Hoop history was kind of recapping, like, NBA head coaches in the preseason had made all these cocky, or in some cases, humble assessments of like, what was gonna happen this year? And all the writers just write, oh, you know, the Sonics are gonna be good, and the Suns are gonna be bad, whatever.

• 8:23Speaker 05

  And then it just turned out completely wrong in a bunch of cases. And so just being a [bleep], I like, recapped like, what actually happened in the season, with like, what they said in the preseason. Because the point was, we were trying to kind of close the gap between how NBA people talk behind the scenes and what the public knows. Because it felt to me like there was a very big gap there.

• 8:42Pablo Torre?

  And so that philosophy, which you, again, sort of pioneered in terms of covering basketball on the internet at that point. It brought you inside of ESPN. What you were doing, running NBA coverage for ESPN, the magazine and dot com, which was the job that I had for a while at ESPN. How did your relationship with Adam Silver sort of develop compared to you guys on the sidewalk in that first meeting you just described into now you have a very different sort of more high up on the ladder dynamic?

• 9:20Speaker 05

  That's a really interesting question. On the one hand, when I was in that job, like that ESPN meets with the NBA, there's called the monthly and there's it looks like when the US would meet the Soviet Union with like the super long table, it doesn't have the two flags, but like it might as well. And I would see Adam during that period, but in fact, I think that, and he was generally supportive, they wanted smart coverage of the league and they wanted deep passionate coverage. But there was one, I had one stark black mark on my record, which I was never able to forget, which was I wrote in depth about doping. And I quoted the head of the world anti doping authority, saying that the NBA's process was not good.

• 10:02Speaker 05

  And like that, that was like every board of governors meeting, I would get that thrown in my face, not by Adam directly, but his like key people. And that was, it was just a warning sign that I didn't go along with the program, I think. And that was a little, was a little unsettling.

• 10:16Pablo Torre?

  Well, look, the power dynamic at the board of governors, right? I'm trying to explain to people how the NBA operates in real terms.

• 10:27Speaker 05

  They'll have like a mini press conference. I think it's probably on NBA TV, right? And then, I mean, over time, it became clear that everyone in the room would ask like inside the box questions because they're want to keep getting invited to this meeting. And then I'd be like, you know, what's the deal with Pukharov or whatever? And then they'd be like, we'll talk about in the hallway. You know, they're like, wait in the hallway, they'd be like, what the?

• 10:48Pablo Torre?

  No, but, but how the NBA deals with press and how they cultivate that level of relationship such that we will handle this off mic, we'll handle this off camera, talk to us over there, but not in front of everybody. To now just speed forward to the board of governors meeting in 2025.

• 11:10Pablo Torre?

  I thought of you when I was hearing Adam Silver in response to our reporting, say this.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  When the podcast came out, it was news to me. I frankly never heard of the company aspiration before, and I'd never heard a whiff of anything around endorsement deal with Kawhi or anything around engagement with the Los Angeles Clippers. So it was all new to me.

• 11:34Pablo Torre?

  He said, "I'd frankly never heard of the company aspiration before. I'd never heard a whiff of anything around an endorsement deal with Kawhi or anything around engagement with the Los Angeles Clippers. So it was all new to me." And I restate that because it could not be more unambiguous. What Adam Silver on September 10th, 2025, after this Board of Governors meeting, is communicating to the public in response to questions. And I think of that because when Adam has to respond to something behind that dais, it means that it's reached a certain level of, "We can't control this story." And that's

• 12:16Pablo Torre?

  the thing I have been thinking about throughout the whole news cycle, which has now been, you know, six, seven months of our investigation of the Clippers and aspiration, which just took another step on Friday, which is that this is a story, Henry, fundamentally, about people that the league cannot control or intimidate. And I mean that to be the former employees at that company. I mean that to mean you. I mean that to mean me more than ever before, because there is something like an independent perspective on what constitutes the public interest and whether the league itself should be the arbiter of what is interesting to said public.

• 12:56Speaker 05

  They have it set up pretty well. I think like their information control, you know, is good so that by and large, Joe, sports fan, you know, who's consuming from league partners, right, or places where the league's very influential, he's getting a view that like Adam's... reputable and honest and just trying to care about basketball as best he can. And, you know, but it's every time Adam says something completely disingenuous like in that clip he just played, it's like a 1% ding in his credibility, right? And I feel like we might be reaching a point where those 1% are adding up.

• 13:32Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I mean, just to then point out, Aspiration, which Adam had never heard of, was the company that had a $300 million-plus-dollar unprecedented founding sponsorship deal with Steve Ballmer and the Clippers. And these deals have to be approved by Adam Silver's office, the league office. It's in the contract that I obtained. You can see it there according to the actual text. And so at a conference with Front Office Sports, Adam Silver is asked about this, and this is what he says in response.

• 14:06Speaker 06

  You have said you hadn't heard of Aspiration before, but a $300 million deal with the team, you know, the team was going to be like a Jersey Patch sponsor. They had Aspiration on the back of the courtside seats. I think probably-

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Just to be clear, I'm not sure if I said I never, if I said I never heard of it, I meant in the context of the accusations here. I mean, I certainly was aware of the brand, but I didn't know anything about it.

• 14:27Speaker 06

  Got it, yes, because I think-

• 14:30Speaker 05

  Like, what does that even mean?

• 14:33Pablo Torre?

  And I am trying to, I'm trying to be frankly, like, I've been slow-playing a lot of this, if only because I am perpetually trying to figure out, what am I missing here?

• 14:46Speaker 05

  Nothing, you're missing nothing.

• 15:05Pablo Torre?

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• 16:51Pablo Torre?

  I need to disclose something. Henry Abbott used to be my editor at ESPN, and you're responsible for a lot of the way that I saw NBA power dynamics.

• 17:02Speaker 05

  And see, and Bron got me on Seabass. That's what we're really at the core of our relationship.

• 17:07Pablo Torre?

  When I investigated the friendship between LeBron James and Dwyane Wade and surfaced the revelation via Gabrielle Union, Dwyane Wade's wife, that, yeah, LeBra, LeBra was responsible for Dwyane Wade trying Seabass. Bron got me on Seabass.

• 17:23Speaker 05

  Gabrielle Union, who's married to Dwyane Wade, thought he didn't like fish, but Bron ordered for Dwyane Wade when he wasn't there. And Gabrielle said, "I don't think he likes Seabass." And then Dwyane's like, "Ah, you know, Bron got me on Seabass." After which, I really genuinely thought, I was like, "I think we should interview Gabrielle Union for every single story we do."

• 17:38Pablo Torre?

  She is incredible. It's incredible.

• 17:40Speaker 05

  The best.

• 17:40Pablo Torre?

  It's incredible.

• 17:41Speaker 05

  The best.

• 17:41Pablo Torre?

  But all of that is the backdrop for, "You used to edit me, now you don't." And so I genuinely have not talked to you on, really, at any length about this Clippers investigation we've been doing.

• 17:56Pablo Torre?

  The question of a smoking gun, right? So this is the phrase that everyone keeps mentioning. And I wonder what you think of that concept? And what is the threshold for the NBA to do something?

• 18:10Speaker 05

  So in this instance, you know, with the richest owner. Okay, well, just to be clear, like, anybody who works in Wall Street or with money or, you know, or in a lot of industries would say, like, basically, you know, what's going to make them the most money? What's the best for their business? That's the truth, right? Like, this is, you and I are weirdos because we're journalists and we think the truth isn't subject to, like, how much Steve Ballmer's worth. But like, most people are like, well, frick, do you really want to upset Steve Ballmer? Right? So, you know, the NBA is a shocking number of lawyers. Why would that be? It's a sports league, right? They're mostly a marketing body. Why would they have all these lawyers, right? I think the answer is because lawyer is an industry that's responsive to billionaires, basically, right? This is where billionaires get to call the shots. And this has been the MO from hundreds of people who have worked there over the years

• 18:55Speaker 05

  who I know are just like, this is what happens there. So to me, like, their decision is, we definitely want to keep Steve Ballmer. We don't want to kick him out like Donald Sterling. But we need to punish him enough that we look credible the next time Adam has a difficult question in a press conference, like the one you just played. So like, what's the minimum viable punishment to get them there, right? And I would be very surprised if they're not negotiating that right now.

• 19:20Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, so this is, I think, a really interesting backstage dynamic, which is that the cleanest way to settle all of this is through a settlement, which is to say that Steve Ballmer and the Clippers agree that they should not fight what the NBA's proposed punishment is. And at that point, you don't have further public dispute. You don't have the possibility of litigation. You don't have anything resembling more mess. You have the richest owner in sports saying,

• 19:52Pablo Torre?

  Uncle and what his threshold for saying uncle is is what Wachtel Lipton, the NBA's preferred quote unquote outside counsel, their quote unquote independent investigator, what they show to him and say, we have you doing this, that, and the other thing.

• 20:11Speaker 05

  I had a stack, I don't have that anymore, but I had a stack of like every kind of independent sports investigation I could find from a white glove law firm across sports. And I had this stack because a guy, a lawyer who worked on those at a very prominent law firm, basically told me that they don't do good investigations. They do what the person who pays wants them to do. They find what they want you to find, right? And I was like, wow, that's wild. Or if there's something that they just can't in good conscience eliminate from the report, they bury it in the report. And if you look when Billy Hunter, there was an independent investigation of Billy Hunter's running of the Players Association.

• 20:50Speaker 05

  And in the executive summary was like enough to cost him his job, but much later was a giant fraud that didn't make the executive summary. And this is why this guy and I ended up having this conversation because I was like, how is everybody not noticing this one? So I printed them all out and basically in a nutshell, I would invite someone to do a more thorough job than I did, but go about this thing and you're gonna find that they always find what the client wants them to find, basically, right? If it's the USTA looking into it, they're gonna find that the USTA did an okay job, right? Or if they find something bad, it'll be the kind of bad that a slap on the wrist will suffice for, right? And if they find that Donald Sterling did something really terrible, it's because they already wanted to get rid of Donald Sterling, right? Like, so this whole method, I think what the question here is, can billionaires police billionaires?

• 21:35Pablo Torre?

  That's it.

• 21:36Speaker 05

  This is a salary cap system that the only people who want salary cap is the billionaires. Like, the players don't want it, right? Like, I don't think the fans care much. Like, the owners want it so they can save money. It's like, okay, so you guys made rules for you, you 30 people made rules for you 30 people, and then this guy just like completely flipped the bird at those rules. Like, can we have a rules-based system or are we merely going to defer to the big bully guy with the biggest wallet and just let him do whatever he wants?

• 22:02Pablo Torre?

  Right. And so, and again, it's not even like rules for rules sake, it's the notion of, are we, as you put it earlier, are we telling people the truth? Right? Like, do you want to know what's actually happening? That's the question I have as a journalist for the audience. And then the question for the league is, do you even need to pretend that there is anything resembling integrity to the things you say are cardinally important?

• 22:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:33Pablo Torre?

  And I hate when I feel like, you know, a Reagan conservative about the rulebook or anything resembling like the respectability of sports. But if sports doesn't care about the rules, then what are we even doing anymore? Right? Like, the whole reason I fell in love with basketball, the whole reason that I care about the NBA came from this fundamental belief that I was watching something that I could believe.

• 23:05Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:06Pablo Torre?

  And so if you're not gonna punish this stuff, I'm thinking about this as a fan, you know? I wonder if the NBA knows that part of the reason why this story has taken off is not because, wow, people really want to see the salary cap enforced. It's because fans, fans are thinking to themselves, are we even watching something that I can believe in anymore?

• 23:35Speaker 05

  And I feel a little bit like, do you guys, when I say you, I mean Adam Silver and the billionaires, like, do you guys love this game as much as we do? Because I would never let it get so messy, right? Like, I mean, there's just so many scandals right and left. And like, you're a little, I mean, I was new to the league. I was like, oh, you're a little bit of a sucker. For instance, if you think you're gonna like, get the story from the press conference, like, you have to go meet him in the back hallway. Like, the only time, so I'm like, okay, you don't wanna be a sucker, right? Well, what about if you're a young NBA point guard and your coach is calling mobsters before the game to tell him, like, you're gonna set Damian Lillard? Like, you're a sucker for believing we're trying to do this on the up and up, right? Like, Adam Silver's created a league where just like the honest, hardworking, you know, like, I mean, my true hoop business partner, David Thorpe,

• 24:19Speaker 05

  has an unbelievably explosive business advising, like, some of the best players in the NBA. Right now, so he's on the phone every day with players and I'm telling you Pablo, they work hard, like harder than anybody because they just love this game, right? They're all in and like, we're putting them in this environment where fricking criminals from aspiration are influential and like how things go down or, or from the mob or from sports gambling or a million other, you know, or Epstein, which I've written about a little bit like, like there's just so much creepiness around this poor, hardworking 22 year old player. Like, let's just make a better, safer world for that guy to do what we all want him to do, which is to just work his ass off and like make this game really beautiful.

• 25:01Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, and, and just to summarize it as, as briefly as I can, does cheating matter?

• 25:07Speaker 05

  Right.

• 25:08Pablo Torre?

  Does cheating matter? You know, like again, I'm, I'm, it's, I, I, I gave the whole prelude as to like how you came up through this business and how my perspective was formed in this business because like anti-authority is yes, it's, it's, it does not necessarily historically align with people who wonder aloud, worried, does cheating matter? Right?

• 25:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:29Pablo Torre?

  But there is, but the question is, in the horseshoe theory of like, why is True Hoop, why am I left wondering, do the people who run the sport really love the sport despite being the people who are criticizing over here and you and me, the sport? It's because there is this, this gap. There is this gap between what the league is saying and what is otherwise being reported.

• 25:53Speaker 05

  Right.

• 25:53Pablo Torre?

  And so in the room, when we were doing that episode on Friday with David Sampson and Amin Alhassan onstage, oblivious to what we were gonna do, um, there was at least one NBA owner I saw in the audience for the whole thing.

• 26:03Speaker 05

  Okay, cool.

• 26:03Pablo Torre?

  There were executives from around the league. There were friends of Adam Silver. Um, there are people who had given Adam Silver various compliments on that same stage earlier that day. And by the way, I, I do want to play the video of what Adam Silver said on that stage while sitting in a chair underneath which he did not realize there was a, an envelope with the whistleblower complaint hiding inside.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  I think transparency is critically important in the league. I think that, you know, Mike Bass is here, head of communications. We try never to be a no-comment league, to answer people's questions, to explain as best we can, you know, why we do what we do, so that even if people disagree with us, it's not some notion of a black box and...

• 26:45Speaker 05

  Like, no, that's not a good answer.

• 26:49Pablo Torre?

  So, God bless Mike Bass. So, Mike Bass, for those not initiated, the reason Henry is laughing so hard is because Mike Bass is the NBA's top PR guy. The point being that when we're talking to the room, it's a power center. And I am always sort of calibrating, how does one keep a story alive when the larger organism of the sports media, let alone the league itself, which we take, of course, at face value in terms of like, I kind of get a sense of what you're trying to do, which is minimize the footprint of this, but when most of the rest of the media is uninterested

• 27:34Pablo Torre?

  because of, by the way, everything we've said so far, in terms of how hard it is to navigate these literal meetings, the general network you have to exist in to coexist and cover the league, they don't want to effectively pick fights. And so, how do you do it? And so, how do you do it? I mean, and so for me, it's like, well, let's make sure that if we're going to do it onstage at a conference, it's a conference that has people in the room who can't, you know, like, close their eyes and close their ears. Let's make sure that if there's going to be a document underneath that Amin and David are also going to sit on, it has this double meaning, you know, of is the NBA sitting on

• 28:19Pablo Torre?

  evidence?

• 28:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, I also feel, so in the wake of Jeffrey Epstein emailing with Brad Karp, the head of Paul Weiss, just an extraordinary amount, and they're like conspiring... To help Jeffrey in every which way. In the wake of that, and you know, this thing that you're doing. I feel like a real question is, you know, do white glove investigations work to convince the public of anything? And for me, I think the answer is kind of no. Like, I just, I don't even care what Wachtel is gonna say. People will, but like, I'm like, they're gonna say whatever's most convenient for the NBA to say, right? And I'm sure you've spent some time imagining what you think it might say.

• 28:59Pablo Torre?

  I have, I have, I have, okay. I have imagined the day.

• 29:04Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 29:04Pablo Torre?

  When I get an email and, oh my God, here's the PDF that I've been waiting for, for a year. And it's gonna have the Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen and Katz letterhead. And it's gonna have, and I've seen the Sarver report, right? I've seen other examples.

• 29:19Speaker 05

  The Pedowitz report.

• 29:20Pablo Torre?

  The Pedowitz report. You know, I, I, I've, I know generally that it will convey that they've talked to so many people, it will have seemed. They will establish the tonnage. Here's how many people we spoke to.

• 29:36Speaker 05

  And the number of documents they reviewed, it's gonna blow your mind.

• 29:40Pablo Torre?

  And, and, and I am familiar with using that accounting to convey the seriousness of investigation, right? I, I, there but for the grace of God, go I, right? Like, it's, it's, I get all of that. But as always, the question becomes, what is the conflict of interest? And I, I, and, and I am somebody who, look, yes, I, I, I need to, at every possible turn, remind people that I am telling a story that has been conveyed now by nine former employees at that company.

• 30:13Speaker 05

  It's a big number, man.

• 30:14Pablo Torre?

  And it's former employees of the Clippers, it's former employees of the federal government in all of these branches. Like, I, and again, I'm doing it right now. Look at how many people I interviewed. The difference is, I'm not getting paid. By the entity that that is being investigated fundamentally.

• 30:33Speaker 05

  Because that would be insane.

• 30:35Pablo Torre?

  And so, and so, and so the question, this is that question of like, what does the public think? I think on one hand, the public is looking for someone with official looking letterhead to tell them, this really happened. Here's the punishment. And I've heard from a number of people in the media especially, who are like, wake me up when the punishment happens. And I get it, right? Because on maybe most generous to me, they have a sense of what I'm trying to convey. And they're just like, look, I'm a sports fan. Is this gonna matter at all? That's a mechanism of, of, of the punishments. So wake me up when that punishment is dropped. But that is, I, I just could not relate less to the premise of let the NBA tell me

• 31:20Pablo Torre?

  what matters when it comes to what's secretly happening inside the NBA.

• 31:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think, I don't begrudge, like, you know, probably my neighbors over there don't watch a lot of the NBA. And when Adam Silver is on the podium saying like, oh, you know, Steve Ballmer's a good guy, turns out like, like, they don't have a lot of time for the NBA, right? Like, they're doing other things. They have their whole lives to lead. And so we focus on the NBA all the time, but like to them, it's like a now and again thing. It's like me with ice skating or something. It's like, ah, whatever's happening. And I think in general, I, I like the idea that we would live in a world where the guy in the suit, who's reputable, behind the microphone, if he declares like, we're good here, I like the idea that we live in a world where we are good here.

• 32:05Speaker 05

  And it doesn't mean that'd be perfect, but instead, we've gone like full 180, where to me, like the, the, there's no effort to be decent, right? There's no effort to just generally make things work well. Instead, it's just like, you know, billionaires have gained an absurd amount of power in all facets of our lives, and they just have errand boys behind, in those jobs. And like, they're basically selling the reputation. I say Adam Silver gained a reputation in the first half of his career, and now it's like for sale to the highest bidder at this point, right? Like, and, you know, Donald Sterling didn't make the cut. You know, we'll see if Steve Ballmer does. I think he's gonna.

• 32:47Speaker 05

  One other thing I'll say is every sports league is under threat from like the live golf threat.

• 32:52Pablo Torre?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:53Speaker 05

  Right? Like they might, the PGA didn't play ball with the Saudis and so now they got a whole frickin' expensive new critical crisis on their hands, right? The NBA is in a similar, you know, has feels the same threats and has to accommodate these threats. They're in this world of private equity and offshore money and monarchs and sovereign wealth funds and and they have to win in that world or else it could be a real problem. And having Steve Ballmer, the richest owner in sports, like with money that isn't from there is actually a very important ballast in that.

• 33:24Pablo Torre?

  Absolutely.

• 33:25Speaker 05

  And I can see the 29 other, that might be Mark Cuban's freaking the [__] out over this story. He's just like, can we please just keep Steve? Can we please? We need him.

• 33:31Pablo Torre?

  No, look, the question of who is funding the NBA.

• 33:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:36Pablo Torre?

  Is is kind of the the subtext of this entire era we're living in. It's it brings up your reporting into the Epstein class, which has lots of NBA figures dotting it. It comes to why is Steve Ballmer more necessary than ever at a period of great flux in which the NBA is simultaneously actually trying to expand abroad and build a footprint in Europe and the Middle East and Africa and Asia, right? It's it's it's all of that. And it reminds me that as much as I consider, and I met with them, I met with the lead investigators from Wachtel Lipton.

• 34:16Speaker 05

  Were you impressed? Like, what was the vibe? Did you did you think they were on the job?

• 34:20Pablo Torre?

  They're incredibly serious people with real resumes, with links to civil society in which they they do know exactly what my skepticism would be.

• 34:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 34:32Pablo Torre?

  And and they're aware of it. Um, and so it is not to say that they're like falling asleep and billing the NBA endlessly doing nothing.

• 34:41Speaker 05

  Right.

• 34:42Pablo Torre?

  It's not even about them personally. It's about the concept of we're hiring an outside counsel to investigate us, which is a practice in corporate America. Above and beyond, walked Talipton. It's the concept of why do you trust the outside counsel, quote unquote, as opposed to documentation and sourcing and journalism and a whistleblower complaint and bank statements that show that the one co-owner of the Clippers put in money into a default company nine days before Kawhi Leonard got paid after months and months of delay, right? It's all of that.

• 35:24Pablo Torre?

  And the Sloan setting, some stuff you, of course, Henry, can't plan. And so the notion that we were gonna do this thing on the chairs that Adam Silver was sitting on, with the possibility, maybe, that Adam might even be there, only to learn, to your point, that Adam would not be there because he was

• 35:47Speaker 05

  Still in the White House.

• 35:48Pablo Torre?

  Literally going to meet Donald Trump at the White House for the Save College Sports Roundtable. I'm just like, some of this stuff you just can't script, man. That's Adam Silver now. That's the job that he finds himself incentivized. I'll be generous, incentivized to do.

• 36:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:09Pablo Torre?

  I bring up all of this to say, the Adam Silver that was celebrated, and this is the symmetry, the bookend nature of the Clippers saga, is that Adam enters the league on a white horse ousting Donald Sterling, who had done something, I mean frankly, because TMZ published it, that was unsustainable when it came to owning a team in a predominantly black sport. And so the decision for Adam, when it came to, how do I deal with this? You know, I gave him, and I continue to give him credit for being clear about how unsustainable this is. But also, it was kind of an easy call in retrospect.

• 36:55Pablo Torre?

  When it comes to just the PR, does the public feel one way? And do I have to respect the public's feeling about this story? So that's the first thing that he does when he gets in.

• 37:07Speaker 05

  Can I just quick, like, I have a different view of that story for the record.

• 37:10Pablo Torre?

  Oh, great.

• 37:12Speaker 05

  So David Stern was an absolute bully in such a manner that he had 17 assured votes for almost anything he wanted, including Donald Sterling's. And so when David Stern was leaving the league and Adam was replacing him, Adam didn't have a way to get things passed. And so they needed to make Adam tougher, stronger, like, there had to be a reason to listen to him. And so I believe that they just, before the tapes came out, I think that they were gonna kick Donald Sterling out for something. And, because he needed to, like, you know, it's like you walk in the bar and you punch the biggest dude, then like, everyone's gonna listen to the next thing you say, right? Like, and so Sterling was vulnerable for a lot of reasons, and he wasn't gonna be

• 37:53Speaker 05

  loyal to Adam, and so they did a couple of things, arguably also kept the Kings in Sacramento. And watch Vivek is like, the biggest homer for Adam you've ever seen. But like, I think they were just establishing Adam's voting block to assure his, like, stability as a leader, and that the tapes were just a handy way to do that.

• 38:10Pablo Torre?

  The notion of what the commissioner of the NBA needs to get things done. The number 17 does keep coming up if you talk to people around the league. Can you explain the politics of the Board of Governors when it comes to how do you make big decisions in this club?

• 38:25Speaker 05

  Yeah. So we've been asking, can billionaires govern themselves? And the answer is no, right? But like, Adam has to get things passed. And so there are 30 NBA governors, which is essentially a synonym for the 30 billionaires who own the teams. And do you have to get 17 votes to pass the collective bargaining agreement, which is really the governing document of everything that happens at the NBA? And so if you have 17, you can do almost whatever you want, but if you have 16, you can't do anything.

• 38:52Pablo Torre?

  So if you ask yourself the question, what would rise to the level of Steve Ballmer, for instance, being forced to sell the team, that requires at least 17 owners to say, this is unsustainable. We can't do this. He is grievously offending the very principle that we all agreed on. He's cheating us. And get him the [bleep] out of here. Nobody is saying that that is likely. And I think even the framing of that, because I'm, and I'm myself, I have no proscriptive demand for what the punishment should be. On some level, Henry, like that's beyond, I, I, I am not somebody who knows the history of

• 39:35Pablo Torre?

  all of the NBA's punishments and the schedule that would apportion fairly in this case.

• 39:42Speaker 05

  Very hard, very hard to do, yeah.

• 39:44Pablo Torre?

  It's like a fake justice system. It's a fake justice system, and so what, what feels fair, I don't know. I just know that this feels like the most egregious caps or convention scandal in public record that I've ever seen. And so what is on the table?

• 39:59Speaker 05

  To me, they should kick him out and then kick him out. Let's drop the hammer and then he gets to expansion team in Seattle, which he would prefer to have anyway. And then in the meantime, you can charge him a fortune, right? You can find him on the way out and you can find him on the way in. And then you get him back in the league and everyone's happy. And it looks like you were really tough because there'll be a couple of years in between and everyone will forget. Which is what we do.

• 40:20Pablo Torre?

  Wait, no, hold on, I'm, I'm, again, the, the vision's blurry. I'm seeing, I'm seeing Henry become a little, a little taller. A little, a little, now you're wearing a suit as I'm squinting, seeing the Adam Silver hiding inside of you.

• 40:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, I could do that job for, for that one. I got this.

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• 41:55Pablo Torre?

  I want to be generous also to Adam, right? Because I don't think it's easy to do that job and service 30 different billionaire owners and their associates and have to be beholden to corporate money that is currently in immense flux because of the state of the US economy. And also, you know, he's following in the footsteps of a guy who has looked with every passing week like a more appropriate leader for this time, which is his mentor and former boss, David Stern. And I wonder if the Stern thing, right? The question of like, what would David Stern do? Is that even the right question to ask here?

• 42:39Pablo Torre?

  How is Adam? How is he? When it comes to his regime, how is he handling this in a way that feels like a choice as opposed to something that is just the natural gravity of what you have to do when you do this job?

• 42:58Speaker 05

  I think David was more of like a wartime consigliere and Adam was more of a peacetime consigliere. So they have these stylistic differences, which we're feeling because I think it's kind of wartime for the NBA now and he might not be the right temperament to make some of these problems go away faster. He's kind of a negotiator and consensus builder, which is great for a lot of things, right? He's the right guy to put together NBA Europe, let's say, but he's not the right guy to like slap around Steve Ballmer, you know, and make this go away. So there's a little bit of that, but I also think the world is very, the media world is really different, right? So in the, I mean, I'm going to say this in like a crude way, but like Michael Jordan is, was always an a**hole, right? Like all sorts of, you just, you know. To the people who knew him well, ask Scottie Pippen.

• 43:41Speaker 05

  Ask anyone who didn't want their wife or girlfriend to be hit on, right, etc. Like, Michael Jordan was like, kind of a handful. But they, David Stern's era, they packaged him up as like, you know, he always wore a suit everywhere. He smiled when they paid him to smile. You know, like, he did like, they convincingly told us he was like, the greatest guy. And it worked. And so it was a fraud. But to make that fraud happen, David Stern only had to call like, three people. You know, like, the NBC producers, you know, whatever. It's very manageable.

• 44:11Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 44:12Speaker 05

  Now, if Michael Jordan, I mean, LeBron is, I would say, all in all, like, a nicer guy. You know, like, a more marketable guy. But he came during the digital age. And so like, LeBron's been the villain almost the whole time. Because there aren't, like, Adam doesn't have enough time to call enough people. Because like, the people who make LeBron's reputation number in the thousands. Right? And include both of us and a bunch of others. And like, you just can't, you can't make the fraud. Right? It's just like, hard to do.

• 44:40Pablo Torre?

  Well, there's also, it's also the parallel of like, when David Stern was coming up, he was also trying to sell the league in a way it had never been sold before.

• 44:48Speaker 05

  Right.

• 44:48Pablo Torre?

  And so, the whole notion of like, we gotta have McDonald's as our partner for Michael Jordan and us. You know, like, and that will confer a mainstream, "Welcome us into your living room" kind of comfort with a black league. You know, like, that was so immensely important to the cultural evolution of the league. It's why the dress code is implemented. For reasons that are fraught and [bleeped] up in many key ways. But the logic was, "We need to sell ourselves to mainstream America," quote unquote. And now, what we're, what we're seeing is, you know, it's not, you're right, it's not just, we gotta pick Nike and McDonald's and, and Team USA.

• 45:31Pablo Torre?

  It's, we are, we now have the opportunity to draw money from FTX. And put it on the Miami Heat arena. Crypto.com and put it on what used to be Staples Center. Uh, let's, let's get, I mean, to go on and on down the list. Let's get any number of fraudsters, including Joe Sandberg, co-founder of Aspiration.

• 45:52Pablo Torre?

  To be on the jersey of our teams. You know, it's the real estate question. There are ever more buyers now interested in using what had been carefully crafted to now launder their own images. And that's the part that I think Adam is not handling especially well is you're selling integrity that had been built up over time because you need to grow a league that has grown beyond anyone's wildest imaginations.

• 46:24Speaker 05

  And when businesses are newer, they tend to have a higher holy calling, right? There's a mission. In women's sports right now, like my daughter works in the NWSL and like, you know, part of the thing they want to do is win games and make money. But part of the thing is exist, right? They are just fighting to like, make sure this thing is real. And that's like, on that mission, everyone's so excited with every win, right? So a McDonald's deal for the NWSL is a triumph for everyone, right? David did that. He made the NBA, you know, he said in his victory tour when he was retiring that basically like, you know, everybody said that Americans would never support a black league. And like, basically he showed them.

• 47:02Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 47:02Speaker 05

  Right? So, so he did it. It became part of the firmament of America, became this billion dollar business that's on everybody's TV, every screen. And so what's the mission now? Right? And this is where I feel like, ah, it's a little fuzzy, but I don't know. But FTX, okay, you know, they got a big checkbook, they can be part of the mission. Like, helps nothing, does nothing for basketball. It just means these people, everyone involved in NBA would do the same work if they got half, right? Like, the league would be exactly the same. The billionaires would also get half, right? But like, that's just, we just, we did the FTX deal, so now we have twice as much money and we split it, you know? Like, that's where we are. It didn't get any different or better for fans. It just brought in all these people with dirty money, right? Like, dirty money is the growth area.

• 47:43Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, where is the money coming from? Yeah, I mean, that's and what does that require, right? What does it require? It requires something that I think this is where I think it's fair to criticize. The steward of a game that I could not be, despite all of it, a bigger fan of. It's are you doing due diligence? Are you actually, you know, they're very good at gatekeeping so many aspects of the game, except for who gets to be in business with it.

• 48:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:10Pablo Torre?

  And so this brings me back to just like, how do I feel about what the NBA's investigation is at this moment? Like, what's the state of the union? They may, it's entirely possible that they are so deeply resentful of this conversation because they have the whole joint cased out. Sure, maybe you guys are actually finding stuff that I have never even heard of. And maybe there is some part of them that is considering even acting on that. The question I have is the incentive structure. And my cynicism is informed by the history of past investigations and established institutional

• 48:54Pablo Torre?

  incentives and the way in which the people who are levers on accountability are in general disinterested in applying pressure. And that's where I'm like, yeah, excuse me for being pessimistic about integrity.

• 49:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is like the George Mitchell report into baseball. It's like, you know, somebody has to be able to take the mic and say, hey, well, this is what happened here, right? Like, in this case, I'm not sure we have that person other than you. I think like, I think that's kind of where I am is like Pablo will tell me if the report is good or not, and I'll believe that, right? And like, what a [bleep] up. How, you know how much the league has to like, erode their credibility to get to the point where like, not anyone in the league can take the mic and tell us what happened?

• 49:37Pablo Torre?

  It's one of those things also where like, I, I am on some level benefiting as a guy with a niche. From that lonely role of like, I'll be, fine, I'll be the guy who's gonna do the due diligence and tell people about it as often as I can.

• 49:57Pablo Torre?

  But very honestly, this entire process for seven months now, I've been hoping that people will join me.

• 50:06Speaker 05

  I know, I feel that all the time.

• 50:08Pablo Torre?

  It's just like, I'm like, guys, I've been like leaving time in between episodes. I'm, I'm giving people leads. I'm showing that you can say this in public and they're not gonna. I've gotten zero factual corrections. I've gotten zero lawsuits. I'm not saying that to my own horn, I'm just saying you all can like talk about this and even report on this too. And with, there are some.

• 50:32Speaker 05

  People have full-time jobs just covering the Clippers. What the?

• 50:36Pablo Torre?

  The beat writers, I mean, and there are some exceptions and you are one of them, by the way. I want to shout out Mike Vorkunov at The Athletic and Joe Varden that have done some reporting on this. But man, it's just like, thank you for doing me the favor of establishing a niche that I'm actually not asking for. Instead, I'm on a podcast with [BLEEP] Zarro Adam Silver, my old editor. And that's about all I got.

• 51:03Speaker 05

  Sorry, man. Sorry, we can't do better.

• 51:07Pablo Torre?

  So I'm watching the news right now and I'm watching a presidential administration, this at the most macro level, even beyond just bomber. I'm watching this administration make deals with crypto companies, with prediction markets, with gambling operators, with the Epstein class, with sovereign wealth funds, you know, with Silicon Valley, with any number of TBD alleged frauds. And I'm watching the NBA, my favorite sport that I grew up loving, in so painfully sincere ways. I'm watching this league.

• 51:48Pablo Torre?

  Do the same sorts of deals. Like, literally, turning to those same sources of money at a time of economic uncertainty, effectively cashing in the credibility and integrity they built via a fundamental policing of the product. They're cashing it in now in ways that remind me of this nightmare that I'm observing writ large in our country.

• 52:16Speaker 05

  Amen, brother.

• 52:17Pablo Torre?

  And the question, as always, as I seem to conclude at the end of so many of our episodes here, is this is a story about a social network. This is a story about a group of people who are being asked questions about what happens behind closed doors. And the follow-up question that I think any journalist, any member of the paying public when it comes to the NBA, the question we should all be asking ourselves is, who do you trust to tell you the truth? And I dare say that it's probably a group project that's required at this point.

• 52:53Speaker 05

  For sure.

• 52:54Pablo Torre?

  But I might not trust the people who are actively trying to cover up the things, allegedly, that are being investigated.

• 53:04Speaker 05

  And not all bald guys with the glasses are telling the same story here.

• 53:08Pablo Torre?

  [laughing] Henry Abbott, hashtag not all bald guys, a movement that I figured we'd get to at some point. Thank you so much for doing this, man. It's good to see you.

• 53:21Speaker 05

  Thank you, Pablo. Anytime.

• 53:31Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 53:37Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.

• 53:58Speaker 03

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