LA Legend Makes Massive Statement on Clippers Owner Steve Ballmer Amid NBA Investigation

Steve Ballmer owns the Clippers amid an NBA investigation. There's a paused Kawhi Leonard trade and years of questions about Aspiration money. Lou Williams did not talk about any of that first. The former Clipper said Ballmer spent a fortune putting the team’s name on public courts because he knew he would never appease fans of the purple and gold.

Lou Williams said Steve Ballmer renovated nearly 500 public basketball courts across Los Angeles with one goal. He knew he could not turn Lakers fans into Clippers fans. So he went after the next generation. Put Clippers courts in neighborhoods. Build the connection early. Create fans from the ground up. “All they know is Clippers.”

On The Underground Lounge, Williams said (h/t) Sports Business Journal. “Steve Ballmer got money. ‘I don’t need no partners. I don’t need no help.’ Every single playground in Los Angeles is a Clippers playground.”

Williams said they used to ask why. Ballmer’s answer, as Williams recalled it:

“I want the Los Angeles Clippers to have an imprint on this city. Because I realized I’m not going to flip a Lakers fan over to a Clippers fan, but I can grow Clipper fans from the bottom up.”

The program is not new. In 2018, the Clippers and the Ballmers, with Mayor Eric Garcetti, funded the renovation of nearly 350 city courts. Williams was at the first ribbon-cutting.

A later county gift pushed the footprint toward 500 courts across Southern California. The Clippers have said most of Los Angeles lives within two miles of one.

Pablo Torre released internal Clippers marketing emails and documents. It showed staff allegedly coordinated promotional appearances for Kawhi Leonard tied to a previously undisclosed Daktronics sponsorship.

The league found no evidence that Clippers owner Steve Ballmer funneled money through team sponsors to pay Leonard to circumvent the salary cap. This was according to ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr., Baxter Holmes and Ramona Shelburne, citing three people with knowledge of recent discussions between the league and the team

According to the same sources, the league is now focused on whether the team’s role in introducing Leonard to sponsors like Aspiration and Daktronics itself violated rules against salary-cap circumvention. And whether the organization is guilty of “failure to supervise” its own employees.

“We introduced players, including Kawhi Leonard, to companies with which we had business relationships," the Clippers said in a statement. "Making introductions between players and team partners is both an ordinary practice by NBA teams and a common request of players and representatives."

League rules do permit teams to connect players with sponsors. It reportedly restricts that involvement to simply providing contact information rather than actively managing the relationship afterward.

That is now under scrutiny given the internal emails Torre published showing Clippers staff repeatedly following up on scheduling.