“And also, in some form or fashion, when you actively try to tell a version of events that is not what is reflected in the reality of this report, which I am told Steve Ballmer and Team Ballmer, legal team, and the Clippers, they were not told a punishment, but they were told, ‘Here’s what we got.’ And if you don’t go forward to negotiate, given that, you end up getting the biggest punishment in the history of the NBA within a scope that is so relatively narrow. There’s more.” “And by the way, people have also asked what changed as a result of the ESPN story. Were they waiting on the public to react so that they could decide what to do? I am not going to yet wade into that. What I will simply say is that before this report came out, I was fully confident, based on my reporting, that we were not going to get 35 pages. We would just get a cover sheet, a summary of findings, a ruling. And that would come on the backs of a settlement. The whole point was to settle.”
