EP 35 | The Kawhi Investigation, Mark Walter’s Sports-Insurance Web & Lioness’ Work-Life Problem

Okay, let's start with Kauai.

Long-time listeners know that we've been following this thing basically from the beginning, so I'm not going to make everyone sit through the entire Aspiration story again.

Okay, the 30-second version is

this.

Aspiration, which is a company that plants trees

for carbon credits, sort of scammy from the beginning, but whatever, they go bankrupt, blows up.

The bankruptcy docket, which is called CTN Partners in court and in our site, if you're scrolling around, exposes Kawhi Leonard, the Clippers star, his company's called KL2 Aspire, as a $7 million creditor of the estate.

That led Pablo Torre, podcaster, Pulitzer Prize winner, into an investigation about what turns out to be a $28 million endorsement deal between Kawhi and the company, where Kawhi basically did nothing in return for the money.

And eventually that turned into an NBA investigation into whether the Clippers used the team sponsor, Aspiration, to pay Kawhi outside the salary cap, which is a big deal in the NBA because the salary cap is everything.

Long-time listeners know we covered Joe

Sandberg, the founder, and his absurdly zealous prison sentencing.

We did the Toronto trade getting frozen way early on.

We noted all sorts of interesting bankruptcy questions that remain to be answered.

Those still aren't, but things on the NBA side started to pick up this month.

On August 7th, Pablo Torre, hopefully future guest of the pod, reported that Kawhi had another previously undisclosed multi-million dollar endorsement deal.

This one with a company called Daktronics.

That company is the one that built the $100 million halo board The reporting found no public-facing Kawhi work for Dak, which at this point is I think pretty much should be expected from this shit.

Yes, Jason, the bankruptcy gods grind slow, but they grind exceeding small.

Now we have two, two apparently bogus endorsement deals.

We have Aspiration, team partner, giving Kawhi a do-nothing multi-million dollar deal.

Then Daktronics, makers of the big TVs you Philistines watch the game on while at the stadium, giving him another no-show multi-million dollar deal.

If I had a nickel for every under the table salary cap evading endorsement deal

allegedly Kevin, I'd

have two nickels, Jason.

But it's still weird that it happened twice, especially for a guy with the salesmanship skills of a pile of turnips in a Chelyabinsk cellar.