Kawhi Leonard Finally Addressed The Clippers/Aspiration Scandal And Naturally He Made Things A Million Times Worse

Juan Ocampo. Getty Images.

As expected, there was no way around the fact that during their Media Day session today, the Clippers were going to have to answer some questions about Pablo Torre's reporting around the entire Kawhi Leonard Scandal. I'm sure they met with their lawyers and came up with a game plan as to how they would answer certain questions, as evidenced by how Lawrence Frank answered the following question around Kawhi's uncle asking for extra benefits

I mean, the easy answer if something like that never happened would be no, correct? To me, that was clearly a predetermined answer to that type of question because if you remember, Steve Ballmer pretty much said the exact same thing word for word, bar for bar a few weeks ago when he went on ESPN

Notice how Ballmer didn't clearly just say "no" either? That's not an accident.

But it's one thing to hear from the owner/front office in regards to this whole scandal. The beauty of Media Day is we were going to be able to hear Kawhi finally address the issue and take questions about everything, and let's just say…..it wasn't great

Oh Kawhi. Ohhhhhh Kawhi. Have you learned nothing up until this point? The last thing you should ever do in this situation is poke the bear, and suggesting that Pablo Torre is just a "clickbait analyst" who is performing "clickbait journalism" is the exact opposite of what you should be doing. That's partially how we got here in the first place! Kawhi has to know that everything being brought to light right now has a paper trail, with real texts, real court documents, sources going on the record etc. To sum all that up to shoddy journalism may as well be an admission of guilt in my eyes. It's the one thing people do when they know the truth has been exposed. 

Not only that, but the "I don't think it's accurate" portion when talking about whether he provided services or not for that fugazi no-show job was tough. OK, so if it's inaccurate that you did nothing, wouldn't the logical thing be to tell the world what you did to earn that cash? Even if you don't remember the specifics, it's not that hard to give a general idea that can then be fact-checked. If Kawhi did something for a tree company as an endorsement deal, my guess is he would remember it, right? Even if it was a few years ago, he would be able to communicate the action in some way or form.

Then of course, there was more

Well, that about does it! Nothing to see here! You're just going to have to take Kawhi's word for it!

This next line from Kawhi also seemed a little suspicious to me

You already knew this was going to happen?? What the hell does that mean? So you knew back when this all started that one day the company would go bankrupt, and as a result, this fugazi no-show job would become public? I don't think so!

Not only that, but how many times did we hear that the Clippers had no idea about this endorsement deal and that Ballmer was actually bamboozled into giving away millions and millions of dollars from a fraud scam artist? Well, it sort of makes it hard to believe nobody with the Clippers knew about this fugazi job when Kawhi himself is telling us all that everyone with the Clippers knew this exact situation was going to happen. Something doesn't exactly add up! 

Look, I get it. There was no way Kawhi was going to step up to the mic today and admit to any wrongdoing. Anyone who expected anything other than what we got hasn't been paying attention. The league, the team, the player, I'm sure they all just want this to go away, and in their minds, the best way to do that is to deny like you've never denied before.

The problem is that not only does Pablo Torre not quit, but considering he's still releasing new documents and texts of stuff as recently as this morning, you know he's not just going to sit back and let today's comments slide either. What that looks ultimately like, I cannot wait to find out.