A $30 million fine, five stripped first-round picks, and a one-year suspension. Those figures now become the penalties for the Los Angeles Clippers, with two iconic NBA players offering their thoughts on whether it was appropriate for the crime.
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Kenny Smith, retired NBA guard and TNT commentator, was recently interviewed by TMZ Sports at LAX about whether the NBA’s penalties were too severe. And he sounds rather off.
“You’re gonna have to suffer consequences for that kind of behavior. You’re vehemently cheating. You’re not just toeing the line. You’re actually cheating and you’re cheating at a high level,” Smith told TMZ Sports.
The yearlong investigation conducted by the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz revealed that the Clippers actively engaged in endorsement agreements between Kawhi Leonard and four companies to get around the salary cap.
Smith took it even further by saying that this will change the franchise for years to come rather than being just a temporary blow.
“It’s gonna cripple their franchise possibly for the next five to seven years. You take away five years of draft picks, that’s your core of how you develop your team,” Smith said to TMZ Sports.
This aligns well with the magnitude of what Los Angeles has lost. The Clippers were stripped of their first-round picks from 2029 to 2033, which generally make up the core of long-term roster construction with young talent.
Smith’s comments came after statements by another NBA analyst, Charles Barkley, who made fun of the poor job done by the Clippers in hiding the deal in an interview with Bill Simmons.
“Yeah, like, even if you did a commercial, you could at least cover it up a little bit. You get paid for not doing anything. That’s really bad cheating,” Barkley said on Bill Simmons’ podcast.
The fact is that some of the companies, like Aspiration Partners, were not known to have sponsored athletes before. This was an easy thing to trace because of the fact that there were four companies altogether. However, Barkley did not limit himself to sarcasm and tried to defend NBA Commissioner Adam Silver against criticism regarding how complicated things turned out to be.
“They put Adam in a very bad situation. They got hammered rightfully so, plain and simple,” Barkley said during the same appearance.
That point holds some weight given Silver’s comments following the verdict, stating that the violations were flagrant and that there were institutional problems in the Clippers’ organization that made the ruling necessary.
These comments from Smith and Barkley come at a time when the organization is still refusing to accept the league’s findings, leading to a bigger battle ahead.
“We vehemently reject the NBA’s findings, which are the result of a heavily biased investigation seeking to justify a predetermined narrative rather than facts and evidence,” the Clippers said in a statement.
However, such opposition has not managed to put a stop to Leonard’s trade to the Toronto Raptors, and the $700,000 fine imposed on him is starkly in opposition to the fines that were criticized by Smith and Barkley.