LA Clippers star Kawhi Leonard, whose sponsorship deal with a now-bankrupt green banking company is at the center of an NBA investigation, also had an undisclosed sponsorship agreement allegedly worth millions of dollars with the company that designed the Clippers’ videoboard inside the Intuit Dome, former ESPN contributor Pablo Torre reported on his podcast “Pablo Torre Finds Out” on Thursday.
Torre interviewed someone identified as an “anonymous high-level source under contract for Intuit Dome” who alleged that the sponsorship deal “was 1,000% a way to circumvent the salary cap. It was funneling money from the Clippers through Daktronics back to Kawhi.”
Torre also cited an anonymous former Clippers official who said they knew that Leonard had a sponsorship deal with Daktronics, the South Dakota-based company that designed “The Halo Board” — the largest double-sided halo display built in an arena — inside the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California, the Clippers’ $2 billion venue that opened in August 2024.
The Clippers had not responded to a request for comment Thursday evening.
Though it is unclear when Leonard reportedly began his sponsorship deal with Daktronics, or what the alleged terms for the pact included, a spokesperson who represented Daktronics told Hunterbrook Media, which collaborated with Torre, that Leonard doesn’t have an active contract with the company.
The spokesperson also told Hunterbrook Media, “I don’t know what the company wants to say, or can say, given the Wachtell investigation and all that,” a reference to Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the law firm leading the NBA’s investigation into Leonard’s April 2022 sponsorship deal with Aspiration, a company that also had a sponsorship pact with the Clippers that was announced in September 2021. In mid-July, The Athletic reported that the NBA’s investigators had examined “a previously unreported endorsement deal with another company.”
The NBA launched its investigation into the Clippers and Leonard in September after numerous podcasts from Torre, who cited internal documents that showed that Clippers owner Steve Ballmer invested $50 million in Aspiration through his personal LLC in September 2021. That month, the Clippers signed a 23-year, $300 million deal with Aspiration, making the company the “first founding partner” of the Intuit Dome.
Six months later, Aspiration signed its $28 million endorsement deal with Leonard. An unnamed employee who purportedly worked for the banking company told Torre that Leonard’s sponsorship deal “was to circumvent the salary cap.”
The Clippers have repeatedly denied that they funneled money through Aspiration to compensate Leonard.
Ballmer has said that the team made an introduction between Aspiration officials and members of Leonard’s camp but that it was not involved from then on.
Ballmer has also said that he lost the entirety of his investment in Aspiration — $60 million, all told — and that he was “flagrantly defrauded” by the company, whose co-founder Joseph Sanberg was sentenced in June to 14 years in federal prison for his role in defrauding investors and lenders out of $248 million.
