"Steve Isn't That Dumb" - Mark Cuban Came To The Defense Of Steve Ballmer By Going After Pablo Torre For His Groundbreaking Report

Allen Berezovsky. Getty Images.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, one of the biggest sports stories of the year is currently unfolding thanks to Pablo Torre and his report about some potential funny business going on between the Clippers, Kawhi Leonard, and a fugazi (allegedly) tree company all conspiring together for a $28M no show endorsement deal.

Boy, what a sentence.

Safe to say, this is a massive issue and potential problem not just for the Clippers, but for the future of the NBA. You can’t have teams getting caught doing shady backroom under the table deals that circumvent the salary cap. That’s a no no. Much like we saw with Joe Smith and the Wolves, that shit usually welcomes the NBA’s version of the death penalty.

Given how serious this is and what a potential bombshell this could all turn into, it to be expected that people would start to come to Steve Ballmer’s defense. He’s too powerful to not provide some sort of defense even if it’s complete bullshit.

So far, that defense is coming from Mark Cuban

I’m on Team Ballmer.  

As much as I wish they circumvented the salary cap,  First Steve isn’t that dumb.  If he did try to feed KL money, knowing what was at stake for him personally, and his team, do you think he would let the company go bankrupt ? Knowing all creditors would be visible to the world ? 

They got scammed by Aspiration, along with many others.  Crimes for which they pleaded guilty last week. 

Scammers do scammy things.  They did a $300m sponsorship deal with the clippers in 2021.   That’s a HUGE deal.  The better the team does , the more value the sponsorship has.   It actually makes perfect sense that if they stole money from investors and want the clippers to succeed, why not give stolen money to help keep their best player ? 

It’s sad that @PabloTorre didn’t take the time to find out  how these scammers pulled off their scam. The idea that the default is Ballmer is the bad guy is going to back fire on him.

Here’s my thing. I’m pretty sure those documents that Pablo Torre had were real right? Maybe this is just my idiot brain, but isn’t that basically checkmate? Feels like they got caught red handed no? Again, I’ll concede my idiot brain but that’s how it feels to me.

So Mark Cuban can write whatever long ass tweet he wants, I’m not sure it’s going to change many opinions. Nobody is going to read that and think “hm, you know what? Steve Ballmer is off the hook”. Zero chance.

If anything, this is going to get much worse before it gets better, and it’s certainly not going away anytime soon.