More than a year ago, Pablo Torre made a series of revelations that shook the NBA world. But he teased the LA Clippers weren’t the only team guilty of cap circumvention. The fallout from the NBA’s historic sanctions against the Clippers now extends beyond Southern California. NBA fans are questioning which other team could’ve operated off the books. The speculation got so wild that a section of social media had to bring up Torre’s July 2026 comments on whether he’s investigating Jalen Brunson and the Knicks.
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Following Torre’s extensive independent investigation, disclosed in 2025, the league handed down severe sanctions on the Clippers for violating salary cap circumvention rules involving superstar Kawhi Leonard. The league hit the Clippers with a $30 million fine, stripped the team of five future first-round draft picks, suspended owner Steve Ballmer for one year, and penalized Leonard with a $700,000 fine.
The landmark ruling validated Torre’s muckraking reporting on his podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, which earned his team a Pulitzer Prize. However, the precedent established by the league’s heavy-handed punishment has immediately reignited intense online scrutiny regarding other discounted superstar contracts around the NBA, most notably Jalen Brunson’s famous $113 million pay cut to stay with the New York Knicks.
Brunson left the Dallas Mavericks in 2022 to sign with New York. In July 2024, he agreed to a four-year, $156.5 million contract extension. By opting to sign early rather than waiting another year to hit unrestricted free agency, Brunson effectively passed up a maximum five-year, $269.1 million deal. The $113 million sacrifice took a historic turn when the Knicks used salary-cap flexibility under the restrictive second-apron rules to build the team that won the 2026 championship.
Back in 2025, Torre teased that he was investigating if the Knicks were guilty, too. However, in a July 2026 appearance on The Dan Patrick Show, he joked that his tip line was flooded with calls from Brunson’s rivals. He even got a call from Rick Brunson, Knicks assistant coach and Jalen’s dad.
He, however, told Rick and fans that he’s not “sitting on some investigation” of the Knicks. That was two months before Adam Silver cracked the whip on the Clippers.
The unprecedented scale of the Clippers’ penalty has caused the chatter to resurface across social media, with fans and analysts re-examining the mechanics of Brunson’s discount.
Clippers punishment turns attention to Knicks and Jalen Brunson
In the immediate wake of the league office laying down the law in Los Angeles, basketball diehards turned their attention to Madison Square Garden to compare the situation with New York’s cap-space management.
Fans posted “no way brunson just casually took a $113M pay cut” as social media feeds flooded with skepticism regarding the validity of such a massive discount.
NBA Insider Sean Barnard added fuel to the conversation, tweeting an old clip of Torre being urged to investigate the Knicks and Brunson, and captioning it with a pointed note directed at Torre: “think this is worth revisiting as well.”
Given everything that has unfolded with Los Angeles, it was hard to argue that the timing wasn’t relevant.
Back in July, the NBA fans were frustrated from the stalled Kawhi-Raptors trade. Torre was still revealing more details on the active investigation, even uncovering a second ‘no-show’ deal with Daktronics, who built the Intuit Dome’s ‘Halo-Board.’
So the Knicks weren’t on his radar. Yet fans of Knicks rivals couldn’t help but acknowledge the newfound influence of sports journalism’s most relentless investigator, humorously posting, “‘Come on Pablo while you still alive’ 😭”.
The online discourse quickly expanded beyond New York. “Should look into Cuban and Dirk too. Left 194 million on the table. Mark cuban also attacked Pablo and said he was “Team Ballmer.””
Although Mark Cuban did show vocal support for Ballmer, he drily congratulated Torre on X after the NBA’s punishment.
Meanwhile, protective Knicks supporters instantly rushed to defend their franchise centerpiece, firmly declaring, “Don’t mess with the king of New York.”
However, the sheer size of the financial gap left others convinced that, “There’s no way he took considerably less without a promise don’t have to be kawhi level but it’s something to make it up to him on the backend”.
The debate ignited a fierce clash between skeptical observers and salary-cap realists who stressed: “You people are so stup*d Brunson never took a pay cut he accepted the maximum amount he was allowed at the time instead of waiting another year and risking potential injury to forgo the extra $113 mil… Along with the fact that it made all the sense in the world for Jalen to take this contract.”
No public evidence from Torre or the league has established any wrongdoing by the Knicks or Brunson at the level of what the Clippers were found guilty of. Torre himself has indicated that the two situations are different and that the distinction matters.
The Clippers case had teeth. It involved documented facilitation of outside deals tied to team-linked companies, the kind of arrangement that goes well beyond bending rules.
What happened with Brunson was something else entirely. His early extension was publicly reported, structured within the CBA, and signed at the then-maximum allowable amount for that contract vehicle. Nothing about it was hidden, and nothing about it has been shown to violate the rules governing how those deals are supposed to work.