The NBA levied the largest punishment in league history on the LA Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer on Wednesday after a year-long investigation determined that they circumvented the league’s salary cap rules. The Clippers will lose five first-round picks — selections in 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032 and 2033 — and are being fined $30 million, the league announced.

Ballmer has been suspended for one year, the NBA said, “for knowingly seeking to help Mr. (Kawhi) Leonard obtain off-court income opportunities.” The NBA said Ballmer approved a deal with Aspiration because he knew it was a precondition for the company to go into a sponsorship deal with Leonard.

The NBA report said Leonard pressured the Clippers, through his uncle Dennis Robertson, “to assist him in obtaining off-court income opportunities, successfully obtaining those opportunities, and failing to reimburse payments by the Clippers for personal expenses.”

Leonard has been forced to pay the NBA back $700,000 for his role, while Robertson has been banned from engaging with NBA teams for five years.

Leonard’s future remains unclear for now. The results of the investigation should clear the way for his deal to the Toronto Raptors. The Clippers agreed to trade him there earlier this summer, but the deal has been on hold.

“ I accept full responsibility for lapses in judgment by people within my inner circle and regret the distraction this situation has caused the fans and my family,” Leonard said in a statement. “I entered into my contract with the Clippers as well as the agreements in question in good faith, fully committed to fulfilling my obligations and with no knowledge of any intent on anyone’s part to circumvent the salary cap… As I return to Toronto, I am focused on what I can control, closing this chapter, and moving forward with a clean slate.”

Clippers team president Lawrence Frank has been suspended for six months, while the Clippers president of business operations, Gillian Zucker, has been suspended for one year. The NBA’s report said that Frank and Zucker received different punishments for their roles because while Frank was open and honest about his recollections, to their determination, Zucker was evasive and “inconsistent” in her interviews.

“The NBA’s collectively bargained system for determining player compensation is a fundamental component of the basketball competition that the league oversees for the benefit of the teams and players and ultimately the fans,” Adam Silver said. “I am deeply disappointed by the flagrant violations of our rules and by the Clippers’ institutional and leadership failures that led to this misconduct. The severity of the penalties reflects the seriousness of the violations.”

Wachtell Lipton, the firm hired by the NBA, found that the Clippers initiated deals with four different companies for Kawhi Leonard: Aspiration, Boingo Wireless, Daktronics, and Lockton Insurance. The law firm also found that the team facilitated endorsement deals for Leonard with each of them. The full report can be found here.

The NBA’s investigators said that it is possible there is more to uncover.

“More information will likely surface over time,” the NBA’s report said. “Investigators continue to receive information relevant to the subjects discussed in this report, including as recently as this week.”

The announcement marks the end of an investigation that spanned a full year. What began as an inquiry into whether the Clippers circumvented the NBA’s salary-cap rules through Leonard’s endorsement deal with Aspiration expanded over time.

The “Pablo Torre Finds Out” podcast subsequently reported that Leonard had a multi-million dollar sponsorship contract with Daktronics, which manufactured the large video screen at the Intuit Dome. The Securities and Exchange Commission and NBA has questioned Daktronics about its relationship with Leonard.

The investigation into the Clippers stemmed from a Sept. 3, 2025 report by Torre’s podcast that Leonard had accepted a $28 million no-show contract with Aspiration, the California environmental company that also served as the team’s jersey-patch partner until the end of the 2022-23 season. The NBA had examined whether that contract was an attempt by the Clippers to circumvent the salary cap by paying him beyond the salary he earned from the team and more than he can make under the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement, which is illegal under the league’s rules.

The company had gone into bankruptcy in March of 2025, listing Leonard among its leading creditors alongside the Clippers. According to legal documents filed in court by Aspiration, Leonard was owed $7 million through his limited liability company KL2 Aspire, LLC.

The NBA hired Wachtell to investigate the allegation days after the podcast. The firm has run a number of significant investigations for the league, and the Clippers became the latest, and perhaps its most high-profile, since Wachtell looked into former Clippers owner Donald Sterling in 2014.

After the NBA hired Wachtell, Silver said he expected the league to “get to the bottom” of the Leonard endorsement case.

“We will be thorough, but we will begin with a presumption of innocence, not a presumption of guilt … and then we will follow the facts,” Silver said last September at a Front Office Sports conference.

The Clippers’ ties to Aspiration run far deeper than Leonard. In addition to an endorsement deal, Leonard also received $20 million in equity from Joe Sanberg, the company’s co-founder, who pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges last fall.

Ballmer invested $50 million in Aspiration in 2021 as the company prepared to go public. That same year, the Clippers signed Aspiration to a jersey patch deal worth more than $300 million, making the company a founding sponsor of the Intuit Dome. The team also agreed to pay Aspiration more than $50 million in carbon-offsetting payments to try to become carbon neutral, according to multiple sources briefed on the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss it publicly.

Aspiration never went public and it began to flounder the next year. Still, Ballmer stood by the company, taking part in a $66 million fundraising round that concluded in the spring of 2023. Ballmer invested another $9,999,997.92 into the company, as first reported by The Athletic, even as it was losing money and laying off employees. It also tried to find new investors at that time to stabilize the company, but mostly failed. Most of the new investments came from Sanberg, Ibrahim AlHusseini — a Aspiration board member who later pleaded guilty to federal fraud — and Ballmer. There was just one new investor: Dennis Wong, Ballmer’s longtime friend and the Clippers’ vice chairman.

While Ballmer was a key investor, the contract with Leonard caused strain within the company and among its management. Sanberg was a leading proponent of signing Leonard and granting him equity, despite doubts from others at the company.

“I am personally contributing stock to Kawhi to make this partnership possible,” Sanberg wrote members of his leadership team in a May 2022 email obtained by The Athletic. “Aspiration’s CEO judged the deal to be not worth doing. For avoidance of doubt, any and all benefit to Aspiration from the Kawhi deal is being subsidized by my contributing my equity to make this happen.”

Some Aspiration executives, at the time, wondered why the company signed a notoriously laconic and private player to a marketing deal. The contract also gave Leonard leeway to get out of participating in marketing campaigns. While marketing employees with the company tried to find ways to use him in a commercial, going so far as to discuss ideas and draw up possible visuals for it, Leonard never publicly promoted Aspiration.

Leonard’s contract was also significantly more lucrative than Aspiration’s other celebrity arrangements, according to a former executive. Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Downey Jr. each received less than $2 million in equity, while Drake invested $4 million in exchange for carbon offsets.

The Clippers and Ballmer have maintained that they did nothing wrong. While Ballmer said in the days after the news of Leonard’s contract emerged that he connected his star with his former key sponsor, he said the arrangement was allowed by league rules. Frank, who received a multi-year contract extension last season, had repeatedly denied any salary-cap circumvention.

“Pablo Torre Finds Out” is produced by Meadowlark Media and became part of The Athletic Podcast Network last September through a licensing deal.

This story will be updated.

— Law Murray and Dan Woike contributed to this story