The league office emptied the drawer on the Clippers. Five first-round picks gone, a $30 million fine, owner Steve Ballmer suspended from all league and team activities for one year, and Kawhi Leonard ordered to pay the league $700,000. That is the LA Clippers news that landed this afternoon, the end product of the NBA's investigation into the franchise and its star, and it is one of the heaviest single-franchise penalty packages the sport has produced.
Sort it by what actually hurts, because the headline number is the least painful item on the list. Thirty million dollars is real money to human beings and a rounding error to the man who paid two billion for the team in 2014. The suspension stings more. A year is a long time to be locked out of your own building, out of the meetings, out of the room where the roster gets shaped, and Ballmer is not an absentee owner by temperament. He is the guy on the baseline yelling himself hoarse.
But the picks are the punishment. Five first-rounders is not a fine, it is a decade. It is the entire mechanism by which an expensive veteran roster gets young and cheap again, and it just got confiscated. Every future trade the Clippers want to make now has to be built out of players and salary filler, because the sweetener drawer is empty.
Checked the almanac: the closest real parallel is Minnesota in 2000, when the league voided the Joe Smith side deal, fined the Timberwolves, stripped them of first-round picks and suspended owner Glen Taylor for a year. Minnesota spent years digging out of that. And of course this same franchise changed hands in 2014 after Donald Sterling's lifetime ban, which is how Ballmer got here in the first place. Twelve years later, the Clippers are back on the wrong end of a league ruling.
What I do not have yet is the shape of it: which draft years the picks come from, who runs basketball operations day to day while Ballmer is out, and whether any of this gets appealed. Leonard's penalty as announced is a payment, with no games attached to his name.
That is what I am watching next. Not the fine. The calendar the picks come off of.