Pablo Torre spent nearly a year pressing on a story that a lot of people clearly wanted to go away. He kept reporting on Kawhi Leonard, the Clippers, Steve Ballmer and the question of whether money outside Leonard’s NBA contract was being used to get around the salary cap. And as the scrutiny grew, so did the backlash aimed at Torre.
That pushback got especially loud last month after ESPN reported that the NBA had found no evidence that Ballmer routed money through team sponsors to Leonard to circumvent the salary cap. Former NBA guard Ty Lawson jumped in right away.
“So does Pablo Torre get any fine, backlash, sued, or fired for trying to ruin people’s reputation/life or Pablo can just say oops my bad and sweep it under the rug,” Lawson wrote on X.
He was far from the only one. Torre’s mentions and replies filled up with people acting like ESPN’s report had blown up his work. But there was a catch: the NBA’s investigation was still ongoing.
The league said so at the time, responding to ESPN’s story by calling it full of “numerous and significant inaccuracies” and making clear that the real findings would come once the probe was finished.
Now the results are in, and they do not flatter the people who spent months trying to dismiss Torre.
The NBA said it found “a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations” by the Clippers involving Leonard and salary-cap circumvention. The punishment was severe: the Clippers lost five first-round draft picks, Ballmer was fined $30 million, Ballmer and multiple Clippers executives were suspended, Leonard was fined $700,000, and his uncle and former business representative, Dennis Robertson, was banned from NBA business dealings.
None of that means every detail of the investigation confirms every report ever written about the situation. That’s not how this works. But it also doesn’t work the way Torre’s critics treated it on Aug. 17, when a single sourced report was enough for them to start calling him a fraud.
You don’t accuse an investigative reporter of trying to destroy lives because another outlet publishes a story that seems to cut against his reporting. And you definitely don’t start throwing around lawsuits before the investigation that reporter helped spark has even wrapped up. Torre found something, and he kept following it.
The league’s own findings show that the questions he raised were serious enough to launch a year-long investigation, and that investigation ended with the NBA concluding that major rules violations did happen.
There will still be debate over who knew what, who arranged what and how the money moved. That’s the nature of reporting. But after the last year, one thing looks hard to argue with: a lot of people owe Pablo Torre an apology.
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