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

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. 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. Right after this ad. My name is Sherlock Holmes. It's an unusual name. Young Sherlock, a new series from Guy Ritchie. What game are we playing today? ...ontdek de oorsprong... ...of those days are really behind me. ...van het iconische meesterbreid. There has been a break-in. Astounding. You should be a detective. ...met Harold Fiennes-Tiffen, Donald Finn en Colin Firth. If you start wearing a hat like that, I will no longer be friends with you. Young Sherlock, a new series. Kijk nu, alleen op Prime Video. 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 live stream, 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 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 was 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 capture convention scheme for Kawhi Leonard. It says it in the document that Amin Elhasson read. 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 past agreements with the Clippers or to satisfy agreements with other customers and to pay for aspirations operating costs and even to pay Clippers forward Kawhi Leonard an incentivized bonus to circumvent the NBA's salary cap disguised as an organic marketing sponsorship agreement. That's a smoking gun, ladies and gentlemen. That's emphasis added. 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. When did you first meet Adam Silver? Do you remember? 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. I wasn't going to 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. Yeah, he's taller than me and, well, anyway, let's not get sidetracked on how we look different. But there was some, there's always another NBA media event, right? And 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 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. and I'm like boy has that vibe f***ing changed you know I'm gonna say 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 that era is probably long over 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 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. 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 f***ing thing down. No, man. 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? Skeets. J.E. Skeets was out there a little before. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so, Ball don't lie, but Pablo Torre does. Excuse me. Yeah. 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 Rube 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. I think the first post in Troop history was kind of recapping NBA head coaches in the preseason had made all these cocky or in some cases humble assessments of what was going to happen this year. And all the writers just write, oh, the Sonics are going to be good and the Suns are going to be bad, whatever. And then it just turned out completely wrong in a bunch of cases. And so just being a dick, I like recap what actually happened in the season with 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. 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 uh high up on the ladder dynamic 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 it looks like when the U.S. 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, you know, 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, and that was like every board of governors meeting, I would get that thrown in my face. Not by Adam directly, but his key people, and it was just a warning sign that I didn't go along with the program, I think, and that was a little unsettling. 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. They'll have like a mini press conference. I think it's probably on NBA TV, right? And then over time, it became clear that everyone in the room would ask like inside the box questions because they want to keep getting invited to this meeting. And then I'd be like, you know, what's the deal with Prokhorov or whatever? And then they'd be like, we'll talk about it in the hallway. You know, like in the hallway, they'd be like, what the f*** are you? No, 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, I thought of you when I was hearing Adam Silver in response to our reporting say this. 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 an endorsement deal with Kawhi or anything around engagement with the Los Angeles Clippers. So it was all new to me. 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 the thing I've been thinking about throughout the whole news cycle, which has now been six, seven months of our investigation to 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. 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, are 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. Yeah, I mean, just to then point out, aspiration, which Adam had never heard of, was the company that had a $300 million plus 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. 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 court side seats. I think probably- 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 the company. Yes because I think What does that even mean And I am trying to I trying to be frankly like I been slow playing a lot of this if only because I am perpetually trying to figure out what am I missing here? Nothing. You're missing nothing. Transcription by CastingWords Finn and Colin Firth. If you start wearing a hat like that, I will no longer be friends with you. Young Sherlock, a new series. Kijk nu alleen op Prime Video. I'm Kate Kelly. I'm an investigative correspondent covering money and influence for The New York Times. I remember a story that I worked on. There was a conspiracy theory about this event. At the time, I thought, that can't be true. That seems extreme. So I went about the reporting. I I did a whole ton of interviews and I wrote a draft of the story. But there was a little part of me that thought, you don't quite have this. So I went back out and did some more reporting, digging into that little piece that was bugging me. And it turned out the conspiracists were essentially right. Because I had that extra time and I was willing to be surprised, I think I got the right story and was able to deliver that to our readers. So I'm really grateful that that open-mindedness is there in me, but is also shot through our institution, where the editor will say, yeah, take another two weeks and get it right. If this kind of independent journalism is important to you, you can support it and the coverage that I do by subscribing to The New York Times. 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. And see, and Bron got me on CBass. That's what we're really at the core of our relationship. When I investigated the friendship between LeBron James and Dwayne Wade and surfaced the revelation via Gabrielle Union, Dwayne Wade's wife, that, yeah, LeBron is responsible for Dwayne Wade trying CBass. Bron got me on CBass. Well, like, and Gabrielle Union, who's married to Dwayne Wade, thought he didn't like fish. But Braun ordered for Dwayne Wade when he wasn't there. And Gabriel's like, I don't think you like sea bass. And then Dwayne's like, oh, you know, Braun got me on sea bass. After which, I really genuinely thought, I was like, I think we should interview Gabrielle Union for every single story we do. Yeah, she's incredible. It's incredible. The best. It's incredible. The best. 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 at really at any length about this Clippers investigation we've been doing. The question of a smoking gun. Right. So this is the 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? So in this instance, you know, with the richest honor, okay, well, just to be clear, like anybody who works in Wall Street or with money or, you know, or in a lot of business 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 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. 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, uncle. And what his threshold for saying uncle is, is what Wachtell 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. 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. 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 Player Association. 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 print them a lot. 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 going to find that they always find what the client wants them to find, basically, right? If it's the USTA looking into it, they're going to 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? That's it. This is a salary cap system that the only people who want salary cap is a 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, OK, 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? Right. And so, and again, it's not even like rules for rules sake. It's the, 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? Yeah. And I hate when I feel like, you know, a Reagan conservative about the rule book 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. And so if you're not going to 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 are we even watching something that I can believe in anymore? 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, like, 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 going to, like, get the story from the press conference. Like, you have to go meet him in the back hallway. Like, the only time, it's like, okay, you don't want to 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 going to sit 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, 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 freaking criminals from Aspiration are influential in like how things go down 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, 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 make this game really beautiful. Yeah. And just to summarize it, as briefly as I can, does cheating matter? Right. Does cheating matter? You know, like, again, I'm, I'm, it's, 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 does not necessarily historically align with people who wonder aloud, worried, does cheating matter? Right? Yeah. 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 gap. There is this gap between what the league is saying and what is otherwise being reported. Right. And so in the room when we were doing that episode on Friday with David Sampson and Amin Al-Hassan on stage, oblivious to what we were going to do, there was at least one NBA owner I saw in the audience for the whole thing. Okay, cool. There were executives from around the league. There were friends of Adam Silver. There were people who had given Adam Silver various compliments on that same stage earlier that day. And by the way, 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 an envelope with the whistleblower complaint hiding inside. I think transparency is critically important in the league. I think that, you know, Mike Bass is here, our 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. Like, no, that's not a good answer. so god god bless mike bass so mike bass for those not not initiated um 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 it's it's a power center and i and i and 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 because of by the way everything we 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 on stage 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 evidence? 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? me? And for me, I think the answer is kind of no. Like, I just, I don't even care what Wachtell is going to say. People will. But like, I'm like, they're going to say whatever's most convenient for the NBA to say, right? I'm sure you've spent some time imagining what you think it might say. What's your guess? I have, I have, okay. I have imagined the day 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 going to have Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen, and Katz letterhead. And it's going to have, and I've seen the Sarver report, right? I've seen other examples. The Pettowitz report. The Pettowitz report. You know, 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 is how many people we spoke to. And the number of documents they reviewed, it's going to blow your mind. And I am familiar with using that accounting to convey the seriousness of investigation, right? There but for the grace of God go I, right? I get all that. But as always, the question becomes, what is the conflict of interest? and I am somebody who, look, yes, 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. That's a big number, man. 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 is being investigated fundamentally. Because that would be insane. 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 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 going to matter at all? That's a mechanism of the punishment to wake me up when that punishment is dropped but that is I just could not relate less to the premise of let the NBA tell me what matters when it comes to what's secretly happening inside the NBA. Yeah, I think I don't begrudge, like, you know, probably my neighbors over there don't watch a lot of NBA. And when Adam Silver's on the podium saying like, oh, you know, Steve Ballmer's a good guy, turns out 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, whatever's happening. And I think in general, 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. And it doesn't mean that to be perfect. But instead, we've gone like full 180, where to me, like 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 in those jobs. And like, they're basically selling the reputation. 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. One other thing I'll say is every sports league is under threat from like the live golf threat, right? Like they might, the PGA didn't play ball with the Saudis. And so now they got a whole freaking 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 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. Absolutely. And I can see the 29 others. That might be Mark Cuban's freaking the f*** out over this story. He's just like, can we please just keep Steve? Can we please, we need him. No, look, the question of who is funding the NBA is kind of the subtext of this entire era we're living in. 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 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 Wachtell-Lifton. Were you impressed? Like, what was the vibe? Did you think they were on the job? They're incredibly serious people with real resumes, with links to civil society in which they do know exactly what my skepticism would be. And they're aware of it. And so it is not to say that they're like falling asleep and billing the NBA endlessly doing nothing. Right. 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 Wachtell Lipton. 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. and the Sloan setting some stuff you of course Henry can't plan and so the notion that we were going to 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 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. Yeah. 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 continued to give him credit for being clear about how unsustainable this is. But also, it was kind of an easy call in retrospect. 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 here. Can I just quick, like, I have a different view of that story for the record. 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 going to 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 going to listen to the next thing you say, right? Like, and so Sterling was vulnerable for a lot of reasons and he wasn't going to be 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. 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? Yeah. So we've been asking, can billionaires govern themselves? And the answer is no, right? But 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. 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 them the f*** out of here. Nobody is saying that that is likely. And I think even the framing of that, because I'm myself, I have no proscriptive demand for what the punishment should be. On some level, Henry, like that's beyond, I am not somebody who knows the history of all of the NBA's punishments and the schedule that would apportion fairly in this case. Very hard to do, yeah. It's like a fake justice system. It's a fake justice system, and so what feels fair? I don't know. I just know that this feels like the most egregious Caps or Conventions scandal in public record that I've ever seen. And so, what is on the table? To me, they should kick him out and then kick him out. Just drop the hammer, and then he gets the 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 years in between, and everyone will forget. Which is what we do. Wait, no, hold on. Again, the vision's blurry. I seeing Henry become a little taller A little a little now you wearing a suit as I squinting seeing the Adam Silver hiding inside of you Yeah I could do that job for that one I got this. My name is Sherlock Holmes. It's an unusual name. Young Sherlock, a new series from Guy Ritchie. What game are we playing today? ...ontdek de oorsprong... ...van het iconische meesterbreid. There has been a break-in. Astounding. You should be a detective. ...met Harold Fiennes-Tiffen, Donald Finn en Colin Firth. If you start wearing a hat like that, I will no longer be friends with you. Young Sherlock, a new series. Kijk nu, alleen op Prime Video. 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 U.S. 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? 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? 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 bomber 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 fact 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 people who knew him well ask scotty pippen ask anyone who didn't want their wife or girlfriend to be hit on, right? Et cetera. Like, Michael Jordan was, like, kind of a handful. But they, in 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. Right. 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 a 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 into thousands, right? And include both of us and a bunch of others. And, like, you just can't make the fraud, right? It's just, like, hard to do. Well, 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. Right. And so the whole notion of like, we got to 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 f***ed 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 got to pick Nike and McDonald's and and Team USA. say, it's we are we now 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. 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, to be on the jersey of our teams. You know, it's the real estate question. There is there 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. 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 in 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 on that mission everyone's so excited with every win right so a mcdonald's deal for the nwsl is a a triumph for everyone right david did that he he made the nba you know he's 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. Yes. Right? So he did it. It became part of the firmament of America. It 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, 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. There's nothing for basketball. It just means these people, everyone involved in the 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. 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. Yeah. 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 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. Yeah, this is like the George Mitchell report in a 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 f*** 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. It's one of those things also where like 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 going to do the due diligence and tell people about it as often as I can. But very honestly, this entire process for seven months now, I've been hoping that people will join me. I know. I feel that all the time. It's just like, what are you doing all day? I've been like leaving time in between episodes. 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 toot 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- People have full-time jobs just covering the Clippers. What the f***? The beat writers. I mean, look, and there are some exceptions, and you are one of them, by the way. I want to shout out Mike Vorkanov 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 bizarro Adam Silver, my old editor, and that's about all I got. Sorry, man. Sorry we can't do better. 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 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. Amen, brother. And the question is 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. For sure. But I might not trust the people who are actively trying to cover up the things allegedly that are being investigated. And not all bald guys with glasses are telling the same story here. Henry Abbott, hashtag not all bald guys. A movement that I figured we would get to at some point. Thank you so much for doing this, man. It's good to see you. Thank you, Pablo. Anytime. This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.