Pablo Torre's Kawhi Leonard investigation keeps finding new money

The Kawhi Leonard cap-circumvention saga was supposed to be about a sneaker company. Now it's about a soccer stadium in Pawtucket, and the NBA's silence on the whole thing is getting louder by the week.

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While the NBA continues to drag their feet with the Kawhi investigation, Pablo Torre uncovered yet another suspicious secret investment with a professional soccer team in Rhode Island

According to reporting from Target 12 in partnership with Torre's podcast and the outlet Hunterbrook, Leonard was a long-hidden investor in Rhode Island FC, the USL club that got a taxpayer-funded stadium after the project pivoted away from private financing and Governor Dan McKee cast the deciding vote to redirect money originally set aside for affordable housing. Leonard reportedly set up two LLCs, KL2 RIFC LLC and KL2 RIFC REAL ESTATE LLC, the week before he signed his below-max extension with the Clippers back in 2024 — the same extension that's already at the center of the NBA's salary-cap investigation.

The kicker, per Torre: there's no public evidence Leonard has ever set foot in Rhode Island or said a word about the club. His uncle Dennis Robertson and his former agent Mitch Frankel also picked up stakes in the franchise, which is exactly the kind of arrangement that makes league investigators start asking whether the Clippers were quietly sweetening the pot to get a star to leave money on the table.

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This investigation may truly never end t.co/kmKH4YQVwp

This all traces back to the collapse of Leonard's endorsement deal with the now-defunct startup Aspiration, which is what got Adam Silver's office to open an internal review of the Clippers in the first place. That investigation has dragged on for months with no public timeline for a resolution, which is precisely why every new thread Torre pulls feels like it's outpacing the league office itself.

Whether or not this specific soccer investment moves the needle legally, the optics are brutal for a franchise already fending off cap-circumvention questions. Every new LLC, every new silent stake, is another data point for a story the NBA seems to want to move past — and Torre clearly isn't done digging.