The Kawhi Leonard salary-cap saga was already the strangest story in the NBA. It started with Pablo Torre reporting last September that Leonard had a $28 million "no-show job" with a now-collapsed fintech company called Aspiration, a firm Clippers owner Steve Ballmer's circle had also invested in. Ten months later, the NBA still hasn't closed the book, and now Torre has found something new to dig through.
The latest find, from a joint investigation between Torre, WPRI Target 12 and Hunterbrook Media, is that Leonard was a previously undisclosed investor in Rhode Island FC and its new stadium project in Pawtucket. Leonard, his uncle Dennis Robertson and former agent Mitch Frankel reportedly put money in after the stadium hit financial trouble in late 2023 — and Leonard set up two LLCs, KL2 RIFC LLC and KL2 RIFC Real Estate LLC, just days before signing his January 2024 Clippers extension. The stadium, which cost more than $130 million and leaned on public money, apparently never had Leonard's name attached to it publicly until now.
That timing is the whole story. Every time Leonard's finances get a fresh look, another entity shows up connected to money moving around him right as he's signing paperwork with the Clippers. It's the same shape as the Aspiration deal: quiet investment, suspicious timing, no disclosure until somebody goes digging.
This investigation may truly never end https://t.co/kmKH4YQVwp
Meanwhile the actual league investigation has barely moved. The NBA's probe into whether the Aspiration arrangement was a salary-cap workaround has stretched past 10 months and could reportedly slide into 2027 if it heads to arbitration. That delay already has real consequences — the blockbuster trade sending Leonard to the Raptors, agreed to back on June 30, is stuck in limbo after the league warned Toronto it would inherit any penalties tied to Leonard's contract.
So the Clippers can't move Leonard, the NBA can't finish its own investigation, and Torre keeps finding more receipts than the league office has managed to produce in nearly a year. At some point the question stops being about one contract and starts being about how many more of these LLCs are sitting out there waiting to be found.