The Clippers paid $7 million a year to plant trees, and Kawhi Leonard got $7 million a year too
Investigators found no credible explanation for the number, and when the team stopped paying Aspiration, Aspiration stopped paying Leonard.
Pablo Torre Finds Out · Clippers Judgment Day, the NBA's Hammer and the Investigation That Never Ends: Kawhi-Gate, Part XVThe Clippers paid their sponsor Aspiration $7 million a year to plant trees, and Aspiration paid Clippers star Kawhi Leonard $7 million a year.
The team said the $28 million over four years would buy carbon offsets, which pay for projects like tree planting to balance out pollution from its Kia Forum arena. But investigators hired by the NBA found no Clippers witness could credibly explain where the $7 million annual figure came from. A consultant said the team had handed him a $28 million budget to spend, rather than first measuring emissions and then buying offsets, which is how companies normally buy them.
When Aspiration stopped getting paid by the team, it stopped paying Leonard. Investigators found a similar rhythm with other vendors: two companies received nearly all of their Clippers consulting fees upfront, $10 million each, just before signing endorsement deals with Leonard.
Questions people ask
What is a carbon offset, exactly?
A carbon offset is a payment for an environmental project, often planting trees, meant to balance out pollution created somewhere else. A concert arena, for example, might pay to plant enough trees to absorb the carbon dioxide its events produce.
Why would matching payments matter to the NBA?
NBA teams have a salary cap, a limit on what they can pay players. If a team funnels extra money to its star through a sponsor, it is treated as cheating the cap, because it lets a rich team pay more than rivals are allowed to pay.