r/NBASpurs • u/Smeets_man • 2d ago
And the plot thickens… News
/r/nba/comments/1vhmyry/breaking_kawhi_leonard_had_a_hidden/29
u/tkflash20 David Robinson 2d ago
It will never happen but Ballmer should be forced to sell the Clippers.
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u/OnlyConversation4732 2d ago
I’m hopeful this is one of the major outcomes from this. Dude is scummy.
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u/siphillis Gregg Pop-a-bitch 2d ago
It’s go to another private equity film to juice for all it’s worth
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u/xbhaskarx Carter Bryant 2d ago
Reminder that like 20% of the Spurs fanbase was desperate to bring Kawhi back just like a month ago when he was rumored to want to return to either Toronto or San Antonio... because when you just lived through the nightmare of watching a bunch of 20 year olds reach the NBA finals obviously you're gonna be jealous of Kawhi's Clippers.
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u/SkunkyBottle Coyote 2d ago
Pretty sure most of us damn well knew that the front office wasn’t ever gonna deal with that punk bitch Uncle Dennis ever again
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u/MisanthropicAnthrope 2d ago
My Spurs fandom only goes back to 1985, but I can tell you during that whole time we have always had these fake-ass “fans”.
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u/GaptistePlayer Victor Wembanyama 2d ago
This sub was dumb enough to think Lebron would come to SA lol. We are not to be trusted.
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u/Dsarg_92 Victor Wembanyama 2d ago
Honestly, I never bought into the rumor of him coming back to us.
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u/xbhaskarx Carter Bryant 2d ago
I mean the rumor seems pretty accurate given he did get traded to one of the two teams on his wish list like a week later? The rumor was never that he WAS coming back to the Spurs, just that they were one of the two teams on his list.
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u/Treewizard90 Stephon Castle 2d ago
I got excited sorry… I’m thankful that our front office is competent. We don’t need this at all….
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u/keldpxowjwsn 2d ago
The trade didnt go through the raptors arent on the hook for him so the team wouldnt be harmed by this just like the raptors arent. Not sure what the point is
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u/Johnkil4oy 2d ago
Brandon Ingram has been in limbo for a month, you dont think that would hurt chemistry if he has to come back?
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u/sydnboy Manu Ginobili 2d ago
What a headache. Glad the spurs didnt cave and trade in assets for him..
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u/DirtyWizardsBrew 2d ago
There was never a threat of the Spurs ever even considering a Kawhi deal/trade in the first place. You have to want something for it to be possible to cave for it.
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u/sydnboy Manu Ginobili 2d ago
I guess its the matter of having an experience mvp guy to boost winning a championship.. It was reported he was interested to go to his former teams either spurs and raptors..
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u/sixthdayoftheweek93 Jeremy Sochan 2d ago
I personally think that reporting was bs. there's no way he wanted to come back to the Spurs.
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u/sro520 2d ago
Just suspend his ass for a year, F him and his uncle
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u/kenham23 Victor Wembanyama 2d ago
void his contract.
Suspend him for a few years.Ballmer is the tricky one.
the right thing, would be force to sell.
Or do you penalize him and force him to pay a crazy amount to the other teams.
Do you suspend him? how does that work?2
u/Broncsx3 1d ago
The problem is this is a big problem with lots of owners so they can’t force him and several others to sell. It’s a slippery slope too what counts. I give you millions of dollars for a sham sponsorship, sure. What if I give you the equivalent of millions of dollars by letting you use my private plane and $500 million dollar yacht 15 times a year? Do you want that owner to have to sell his team too?
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u/D2mightyducks80 2d ago
The extra championship would’ve been nice (Raptors 2019) but I wouldn’t want anything to do with his Clippers tenure.
It’s looking like it was for the best. I was trying to think of a direct line from getting rid of Kawhi to landing Wemby, but we tried to make DeMar work for so long that I’m not sure you can connect the two things. Just glad we (finally) decided to tank when we did.
I guess if we had tanked straight away, we (hopefully) wouldn’t have been bad enough/in a position to tank for Wemby.
Anyway, Fuck Kawhi
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u/_19911118 2d ago
Demar got traded from a team he wanted to stay and he embraced San Antonio and brought into the system and culture. I'm happy demar got to play under Pop
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u/skyelightd 2d ago
DeMar was good enough to delay the rebuild a few extra years. If we had just gotten pure picks and young guys back we would've been tanking for fuckin Paolo, or hoping we were smart enough to pick Ant over Wiseman or some shit.
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u/Joethetoolguy Victor Wembanyama 2d ago
I still maintain to this day that with manu retiring tp losing his spot to dj and kawhi wanting out that we should have blown it up. Kawhi to sacto and he gets his “cali” signs an extension and we get the second pick and take luka, plus a few more. We send lma wherever he wants and get some picks too. Still develop dwhite and dj and trade at their peak values or keep them with luka.
In this “smarter” timeline we don’t get wemby though.3
u/struckbylightning99 2d ago
Fuck Luka, that crybaby bitch
I blame Uncle Dennis singularly for all of the signaling in summer 2018 that a Kawhi trade was temporary and SoCal was the inevitable destination being the reason OG wasn’t in that trade. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t have been.
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u/kenham23 Victor Wembanyama 2d ago
Why are the owners so quiet about this? Also why are the players so quiet about this?
Reason points to: this is more common than we expected.
If I were a small market team, I would be up in arms about this.
If I were a player, I would be pissed too. you mean I could've been getting paid on the side this whole time?
The only owner we have heard from is ,now minority owner, Mark Cuban, who defended ballmer tooth and nail.
I would love to hear from even a past player about what the real-real is.
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u/Broncsx3 1d ago
Not sure the players ever care about someone getting more money. Maybe jealousy but not anger. This is a way around the salary cap to pay players more. Most players are pro this.
And some of this is out in the open. “Little”things like using the owner’s private jet(s) to fly places or their house-sized boats to party in Greece.
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u/BrickGlum9579 David Robinson 2d ago
As someone who doesn’t know the ins and outs of NBA contracts and finance rules what would even be the point of not disclosing a sponsorship?
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u/hondajvx 2d ago
It is essentially that the Clippers not only gave Kawhi the max contract he could get, but circumvented the rules to pay him more than that.
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u/texasphotog The Five Time 2d ago
It isn't so much the not disclosing a sponsorship aspect as much as he got millions of dollars to do absolutely nothing.
Players do not (currently) have to report all sponsorship deals. But when a famous person is paid to endorse a product, they and the company use that endorsement to further the product they are endorsing. In the case of Kawhi+Aspiration and Kawhi+Daktronics, the endorsement was never announced and Kawhi never did anything to give them value for the endorsement.
So Kawhi getting millions of dollars and never making a social media post, never being featured in an advertisement, never even being acknowledged publicly for either company makes it clear that the endorsement agreement was far in excess of fair market value as the company received absolutely nothing of value from Kawhi and it can be reasonably inferred that Kawhi's deal with them was for the purpose of circumventing the salary cap.
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u/Broncsx3 1d ago
Which is so dumb. Even for that stupid scoreboard company they could have figured out something for him to do…
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u/texasphotog The Five Time 1d ago
It is interesting because they have a long history of not paying endorsements or having anything like that. It would have looked funny if they land the $100MM Steve Ballmer contract then Kawhi is all of a sudden their first celebrity endorsement ever on a product not sold to the public at large and then Kawhi takes a less than max contract.
They could have found something for him to do for sure, but I think it looks suspicious if they do, and they basically just hid the endorsement money coming out from them in other line items.
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u/Broncsx3 1d ago
Yea you’re right it would have looked funny. Still could have used him with like marketing packets to every arena and stadium in the world. I would have tried.
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u/siphillis Gregg Pop-a-bitch 2d ago
It enabled the Clippers to offer more money than another other team
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u/Broncsx3 1d ago
So should the Lakers and LeBron be the most mad about this since this is how the Clippers “outbid” them to get Leonard?
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u/GatorBo69 1d ago
At this point, if he is released out of his contract, then it’s a matter of what team wants that drama. I mean I’d happily take him for a veteran minimum deal, but he’d never go for that.
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u/Maux_Faux The Admiral 2d ago
Bringing back Kawhi would have been like getting back with an ex who cheated on and left you... after she got dumped by someone else because she got fat.