Pablo Torre on the delay in the Kawhi Leonard scandal
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Good morning and welcome to the NBA Daily. I'm Dave DeFore here with Espera Henne and special guest Pablo Torre from Pablo Torre Finds Out. We're going to find out the latest on the Kawhi Leonard investigation. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, guys. Pablo Torre, Pulitzer Prize winner for podcasting over at Pablo Torre Finds Out. Officially two. Congratulations, man. Like, it's amazing.
Two Pulitzer Prize winners on the pod now.
Yeah.
Well, listen, as Tony Kornheiser said to me when I told him the news, they give out Pulitzers for podcasts. And so it's an honor. It's an honor to be reminded that, in fact, turns out they do. Thank you guys for having me.
That's awesome. I mean, you're a trailblazer here. So I just caught the new episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out. Can you catch us up to date on the Kawhi Leonard Clippers aspiration investigation?
Yeah. So we're talking at a time in which Adam Silver is presser at Summer League after the Board of Governors meeting on Tuesday. It's still fresh in my ears. And simultaneous to that, as he's saying that this thing is going to drag into the apparently at any given point in the summer. So it was like soon now it's the summer. That was sort of like the big takeaway of timeline of what he repeatedly calls the independent investigation. That's some of what we were talking about. In anticipation of that, that's what we got. And then the guest on the show today on Thursday is Damora Smith, who is a fascinating guy to talk to on this subject as the quote-unquote independent investigation is proceeding by Wachtell Lipton into all of this.
And as the Players Union, by the way, the NBPA has seemingly pretty reflexively decided to just say, we expect there to be no there there. an effective agreement with the Clippers about what this investigation might find. I say all of that because DeMora Smith is a former federal, I mean, among many things, he worked as a federal prosecutor. He worked as a Independent investigator when he was at Latham and Watkins, another white shoe law firm that, according to his accounting, you know, did hundreds of these cases during his time there. And he was involved in so many of them, how to service a corporate client to investigate their problems in the effort to clean up their problems. And so he's just very funny and blunt about.
candid really about like how this isn't exactly as independent as you think. And also he happens to have been the 14 year executive director of the NFL Players Association. So guys, just hard to find a better person to strip away the BS around who is the client, who is the customer, where is the money going, how do we follow it?
And he was fantastic. Yeah, and look, throughout Adam Silver's press conference at Summer League, he mentioned that at the end of the day, the decision is his, right? He is the one who has to read and parse through the information that Wachtell Lipton eventually has to report and make a decision of sorts. Does that, I guess, the reporting, your investigation, your podcast recently about the independent aspect of things, does that clash with what, you know, the former NFL boss was talking about?
Yeah. So anybody who's done these independent investigations, when you get them in an honest moment, laughs at the premise of the word independent, because literally this is the NBA. And actually, in truth, Steve Ballmer, In terms of who gets billed in the end, this is the NBA paying a law firm to do something within a scope that the NBA itself sets. And so the other thing to your reference of the presser that Adam Silver said, which I had been reporting, and it's sort of that thing of just like he came out and tweeted it. I've been working on it. He said that their general counsel at the league, the league's own lawyers, are in touch with Wachtell every day. Yeah. In which they know what Wachtell is finding at every point in this timeline of now 11 months.
And the reason they do that is because they want to be aware of what the scope that they've given is producing in terms of information.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–5:15
2
What was Adam Silver’s latest update on the Kawhi Leonard investigation at the Board of Governors meeting?
5:15–18:09
3
Why do independent investigations in sports often fail to feel truly 'independent'?
18:09–31:57
4
What new reporting suggests there may be a second 'no-show' Aspiration deal involving Kawhi?
31:57–33:30