Clippers Rock Bottom 9.0, Plus Charles Barkley on the Clips, 76ers, Lakers, ESPN, and Why He Loves Josh Allen

The Bill Simmons Podcast

Bill Simmons opens the podcast with a scathing critique of the NBA's unprecedented punishment of the Los Angeles Clippers, including five lost first-round picks, a $30 million fine on owner Steve Ballmer,

Key takeaways

The Clippers' punishment marks the most severe in NBA history, with long-term consequences including a loss of future draft capital.
Ballmer's ban from his own arena symbolizes the depth of the franchise's failure despite massive investment.

Main topics

NBA's punishment of the Los Angeles Clippers
Franchise mismanagement under Steve Ballmer

Notable quotes

"They've turned themselves into the Southern California Brooklyn Nets."

"If you don't have picks, you can't get somebody like Jokic or Giannis to show up in 2027 or 2028. No free agent wants to go there because you don't have a future."

Conclusion

The episode paints a bleak picture for the Clippers' future while celebrating Charles Barkley's candid

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:06) The Bill Simmons Podcast brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network, where I put up a new rewatch of us on Monday. We did Aliens, one of the most requested movies of the last couple of years. We have Talladega Nights coming next Monday. That's going to be the Ringer Fantasy Football guys taking over the pot on that. Bunch of football stuff next week. Sunday, me and Sal are going to do Guess the Lines week one, and we're going to do all of our NFL futures. I'm going to have a podcast on Tuesday, going Wednesday night after the Patriots game, and then Thursday night after, Speaker 1 (0:35) Rams, and 49ers in Australia. So Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday, we'll all be live on Netflix. So stay tuned for that. I'm in Boston, Massachusetts, where I went to Fenway Park yesterday with my dad and my son and my daughter's boyfriend, who has had an interesting week. We got to see a Mariner's Lost, but we had a great time. And it was great to be at Fenway, one of my favorite places. on the earth. Not really enjoying the allergies these days. Went to my daughter's game on Tuesday. They won their first game of the season. She scored a goal. So that was fun. It's been an interesting week, up and down week in a lot of different ways, but that's the thing. When you've been in the limelight for a while, shit happens. Anyway. Speaker 1 (1:20) So Barkley's coming up in a little bit. That's right. Charles Barkley. Every September right before football season comes on the pod. We had him randomly booked. And yet in the last 48 hours, all hell broke loose with the Clippers. Last 24 hours, last 36 hours, whatever it was. So we got to hear him talk about the Clippers. I am going to talk at the top of the podcast, all my thoughts on the Clippers. It's going to be right after the break, right after Pearl Jam. And then me talking about the Clippers. And then after that, Charles Barkley. That's next. Speaker 1 (1:48) The Bill Simmons Podcast is presented by FanDuel. The NFL is here and it's the most rewarding season ever on FanDuel with the all-time FanDuel Rewards Club. Every eligible bet can earn you points. Win or lose, you still get points. The more points, the bigger the rewards you can unlock. Head to FanDuel.com slash BS to start earning with FanDuel Rewards Club. 21 plus select states are 18 plus DC, Kentucky, or Wyoming. Get in a problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER, call 888-789-7777, or visit ccpg.org slash chat in Connecticut. Speaker 1 (2:50) All right, I'm recording the top part of the podcast here early Thursday afternoon. I went to the Red Sox yesterday. My phone started blowing up, and it was because the verdict finally came in on the Clippers from the law firm of Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen, and Katz, and the Clippers were in trouble. This was the biggest punishment ever handed out in the National Basketball Association. You know all of it at this point. Five first-round picks, Ballmer's out for a year, Lawrence Frank, six months, $30 million fine for Ballmer. Speaker 1 (3:18) can't go to his own arena, the arena that he just spent five years slaving over trying to figure out how to make the best basketball arena possible. Can't go to the games. Thanks, chair. This was a phenomenal level of incompetence from Ballmer and the Clippers. When you think back to 2019, where LeBron had shown up in LA the year before, the Clippers were so desperate to be relevant again. Speaker 1 (3:43) in year five of Balmer, that they literally whored themselves out in every way they could. Not only did they do everything it took to get Kawhi, they trade S.J. and all those picks for Paul George because that's the only way you can get them together. Instead of just playing poker with Kawhi, which I still don't know where else he would have gone. Regardless, they get fleeced in the Paul George trade, which was defensible when it happened, but six years later, it looks like one of the worst trades in the history of the league. They got fleeced by somebody named Uncle Dennis. Speaker 1 (4:12) who is no longer allowed near any kind of league business for the next five years. They got screwed over by Kawhi Leonard, I think. You know, you think about, like, who didn't get punished in this? How about Kawhi? He only had to pay a $700,000 fine. He got to go back to Toronto, the team he should have ended up with anyway. Didn't really lose any money. Didn't get suspended for 20 games without pay. And, you know, why'd they do this? Because, obviously, the players' union... Speaker 1 (4:39) and maybe even Kawhi too. It's like, hey, if you're easy on Kawhi, we won't challenge this. And as soon as the players' union can't challenge it, the Clippers have no recourse because they had agreed to abide by whatever the NBA found in the investigation. So if the players' union's not suing and nobody's suing, this is kind of what they're stuck with. They have screwed up almost a decade and a half of their franchise dating back to the summer of 2018. Like, they're not going to have their pick in 2032. Speaker 1 (5:08) That would be 13 years after the Kawhi signing. They could basically throw a bar mitzvah in 2032 for how fucking stupid they are. They've turned themselves into the Southern California Brooklyn Nets. They, I think, will have less fans over the next couple years than they've ever had at any point in the history of the franchise, including in the 80s and 90s when the owner was actively trying not to spend any money. And somehow they are the single most depressing situation in the NBA yet again. If you think about the mid-2000s Timberwolves after the Joe Smith verdict and the damage that that did to Kevin Garnett's prime. Kevin Garnett has won 25 best players ever and makes the 2004 conference finals despite the fact that they lost Joe Smith and were starting to lose all their first round picks. Speaker 1 (5:56) who in 05, 06, 07 never makes the playoffs, right? You're one of the best players in the league. You can't even make the playoffs in a 16-team playoff. And they ended up having to trade him to Boston where he finally wins the title. This demolished them. And what happens, and this is what's going to happen in the Clippers, when you don't have picks, you can't get somebody like Jokic or Giannis to show up in 2027 or 2028. No free agent wants to go there because you don't have a future. You have to start taking... Speaker 1 (6:23) these huge risks. You take risks on people like Mark Blunt. That's what Minnesota did. Or Ricky Davis. You're taking these big, expensive contracts that people are actually trying to dump, but the player is good. And you're hoping maybe it'll work out with the player. And by the way, if your front office isn't that good, like look at Minnesota. They wasted the whole mid-2000s. Garnett trade was defensible because they got Al Jefferson and some picks back. But then in 2009... You know, they pass Curry, they pass on Curry twice. So that demolished, I would say. Speaker 1 (6:59) A decade and a half for the Timberwolves? Based on all the picks they lost, having to trade Garnett and then incompetence. Could that be what happens to the Clippers? If Wagler, the first round pick the Clippers got in the Zubac trade, if he becomes a bust, they took him fifth. I'm just saying, I hope he doesn't. I hope he turns out great. If he becomes a bust, this is the single most depressing NBA situation since the early 80s Cavaliers when owner Ted Steepey and... Speaker 1 (7:25) traded away so many first-round picks, they had to create the Stipian rule to basically prevent anyone from being as stupid as this Cleveland Cavs owner was. This would be the most depressing situation since then. All right, so the Clippers are still professing their innocence, but if you do the sniff test here, and this is something that Pablo Torre did so well as he was doing all the podcasts about it, where he had real evidence, but was also like... Speaker 1 (7:52) Hey, does this pass the sniff test to you guys basically? Well, you look at the sniff test now from, from what we look at that report, we know that multiple NBA teams already said in the late 2010s that uncle Dennis was making crazy demands. Like that's documented. They'd like asking for hockey and pieces of hockey teams and crazy shit. So we already knew that was happening in the summer of 2019 from the report. These are just things that were in the report post signing. They said Uncle Dan has consistently pushed the Clippers for 10 million a year and extra Kauai endorsements. And if you read between the lines of 47 different things that you can just add together, it's clear they were like, yeah, all right, you do this and we'll try to figure out how to get you to 10 million a year somehow. Four companies that he had... Speaker 1 (8:41) endorsements with. This is from the report. Each company had never before signed an endorsement agreement of remotely the same financial magnitude and hasn't since. That's notable. Also from the report, each agreement imposed minimal performance obligations on Mr. Leonard relative to the amount he has paid. I talked about this a few weeks ago. It never added up why he was getting endorsement money not to endorse anything. Well, the report spells it out. Go read it. 36 pages. Speaker 1 (9:08) Also from the report, no agreement was publicly announced. So you're paying up money for all this dude to endorse your product, but we don't know he's endorsing it and he's not doing any work for it? Sniff test. There were also emails from the Aspiration higher-ups. The Clippers are promising to increase the amount they pay us per quarter in line. Who's what we pay this guy is a direct quote from one of the emails. Another responded, thanks for verifying. We should be fine if it's cashflow neutral. Speaker 1 (9:36) So this is basically, this is spelling out Clippers giving Aspiration money and it's coming back to them and it's just kind of going back and forth because they're trying to figure out how to get Kawhi stuff. And then also in the report, Clippers chief commercial officer, Scott Sonnenberg, talking about the forum deal that they had. I never wanted this forum deal. Always knew it was super shady. I cannot begin to tell you all the red flags of these deals, just doing what I'm told. So that's documented. Not great. Speaker 1 (10:07) There's some what-if stuff. I got some good questions about this over the last 24 hours, including, you know, the Clippers, the five first-round picks are gone. Should that have just been the prize for the in-season tournament? They're not going to do that. But the first round now, 29 teams, so everybody has a better chance of they move up in the draft. So it has all these ramifications. So everyone else in the league has to be delighted that the Clippers got their legs cut out, and it also makes the draft a little easier for them. The most interesting email I got was from Tim from Philly, who asked, let's say the Clippers won in 2021. And then it turned out all this stuff had happened after the fact. What if they had won a title? What if they won the title in 23? Would Adam have had to revoke it college sports style? Speaker 1 (10:55) One of the weird things about this was a lot of the Kawhi stuff was really centered around the extension, like the 2022-23 range. One of the years where he was hurt, I didn't understand that part at all. And it almost makes it seem like it was some IU stuff. There's a million things I don't get about this. The biggest one being, why are you doing all this for Kawhi Leonard? Speaker 1 (11:21) I get it. He won the 2019 title and you could argue he was the best player in the world at the time. And he gave you credibility to battle LeBron and all this stuff. But you're dealing with somebody named Uncle Dennis. And you're in this world. You could say, you could talk about, oh, every NBA team does this. This is a whole other level of what every other NBA team would do. Like even if they had gotten him an endorsement to do like an El Segundo sub shop. Speaker 1 (11:50) And he held the sub up like that famous Scottie Pippen sandwich ad where he's holding the one with the giant footlong sandwich with the two girls between them. That's one of the funniest ads of all time. Even if he had done that and they overpaid him for that, at least he was getting paid for work. I just can't believe that these people who also built like an awesome building, who seem really competent at everything they do, were this bad when you read this 36-page report. But then you think, what more could we have expected from the most incompetent sports franchise of all time? I wrote a piece, Curse of the Clippers, in 2009 after Blake Griffin got drafted, where I spouted out all this stuff. Speaker 1 (12:28) I'm just going to rip through the highlights, not even from that piece, but everything after. This is a team that traded for a young Moses Malone in 1976 and then flipped them six days later for two first round picks. They traded their MVP, two-time MVP, Bob McAdoo for John Gino and Cash. They traded two starters and an unprotected first for Bill Walton, who had broken feet and ended up having 35 surgeries. Players they stupidly gave away or lost since the NBA merger in 1976. Mention Moses and McAdoo, Adrian Danley, Terry Cummings, Tom Chambers, Danny Manning, Lamar Odom, Andre Miller, and Elton Brand. That's just in the 33-year span from 76 to 2009. They traded future firsts. Speaker 1 (13:09) for World B Free and Joe Bryant. And those first became Charles Barkley and the number one pick in the 1986 draft, Brad Doherty. They took Danny Ferry one spot ahead of Glenn Rice. Even though Danny Ferry was like, I'm not reporting the Clippers and ended up not reporting and playing in Italy, they had traded him the Clippers. They passed on KG and Kobe in consecutive drafts in spots where they easily could have taken them. A lot of people passed on them, but it's notable. They drafted Michael Ola Candy first in a draft with Pierce Vincent Dirk. They drafted or traded. Speaker 1 (13:43) The following stars traded for the following stars who either blew out their knee or their Achilles. Tiny Archibald, Norm Nixon, Marcus Johnson, Danny Marrion, Derek Smith, Ron Harper, and Louis Vaught. They drafted 18 forwards in the top nine over a 33-year span. They drafted Blake Griffin in 2009. Super exciting. Immediately gets hurt. Misses his rookie season. They traded Baron Davis in 2010 to get off his contract. Speaker 1 (14:11) The 2010-11 season, the pick they trade to get rid of the contract ends up being the number one pick in the draft, Kyrie Irving. 2014, their best chance ever to make the finals. They get completely submarine by the Donald Sterling scandal, which was the craziest owner scandal in the history of the league. Submarines them during the playoffs where it seemed like they might have the best chance to win of anyone in the playoffs. So that happened. They do the Kawhi trade, which ends up with... them giving away SGA and Jalen Williams and basically building the OKC dynasty. Then the Kawhi piece of it where he just keeps getting hurt, that basically blows up the first half of their decade where they never know if they could rely on him. Speaker 1 (14:56) COVID 2020. It's forgotten that as we're heading into COVID three teams, I have a chance to win the title Milwaukee and the two LA basketball teams. We go into the bubble. What was the team that completely fell apart in the bubble more than like famously more than anybody, the team that just kind of wanted to get out of there and didn't care if they want to play a front or not the Clippers. And then 2021, right when that season's wide open ends up being Phoenix and Milwaukee. Speaker 1 (15:22) What happens? Kawhi gets hurt in round two. They end up not making the finals. That's the only time they ever made a conference finals. They do not have a retired number, at least that I know of. The best Clipper is probably Chris Paul, the best Clipper ever, who they just completely torpedoed their relationship last year. The second best Clipper they've ever had is Blake Griffin, who they signed to a big contract and then traded to Detroit and cut his legs out. And the third best clipper is probably Kawhi Leonard, who just caused them a bar mitzvah worth of damage over the 2020s and early 2030s. So they have no picks in 29, 30, 31, 32, and 33. And I don't know how you fix it. So the big question for me... Speaker 1 (16:15) Was this the right punishment? And this is, I'm not saying they shouldn't have been punished. I'm saying, was this the punishment that they deserved? Because I think you can make a case. Maybe you give Balmer the choice. Maybe it's either you sell the team or here's the punishment. And if you don't sell the team, your fans are going to know that you chose to keep the team. and screw them over basically for a half a decade. So you pick, you tell us, because either you sell it in the next six, nine months, or here's the punishment. Because the part that gets lost in this is you have all these Clipper fans. There's not a lot of them, but they're there. They're around Southern California. And there's people that bought season tickets, including myself. I have season tickets with my friend, Mike Tolan. When they built this new building, Speaker 1 (17:09) They went around and they went to a lot of, they basically asked if you want to sign a contract, if you go, if you buy in for five years, you know, you get 20% off, you get this, you get that. So we're in year three of a five-year contract for Clipper tickets. And we signed up with a team that just cheated and got, and got docked according to the NBA. Do they care about the fans at all? Like would they offer any Clipper fan like, Hey, this was really bad. We get it. If you want to opt out of your tickets, if you want to, if you bought tickets for a game this year and you want to, you want us to return the money. If you bought half of a season ticket, whatever, um, we're offering a refund right now. What happens if there's a class action fund? Like what? Like. Speaker 1 (17:56) if, if Clippers season ticket people got together and we're like, we're actually going to sue the Clippers because we don't want to pay for tickets this year after everything that happened, what would happen? This has never been tested in the history of, uh, of the NBA. And the bigger thing to me, and this is what I don't like about the punishment. I get why they had to do it that way. And you have to have, basically, this is the third rail and people know what it is. Now, the people that get punished are the fans. Steve Ballmer's worth $15 billion. Right. Oh, no, I have to pay a $30 million fine. Like he probably burped that out. Oh, I can't go to Clipper Games for a year. Well, who watch them on TV? Jillian Jacobs and Lawrence Frank, like they're suspended. He gave Lawrence Frank a huge extension right before all this stuff happened. The fans are stuck with the team. Speaker 1 (18:42) And this is what happened with Minnesota in the mid-2000s. This is what led when I was at ESPN. I wrote a magazine column about how I wanted to be the new GM of the Timberwolves because they had hit rock bottom and maybe they needed hope and some outside thinking. How do you fix this from a quipper standpoint with the fans? Like not only was this Kawhi thing a nightmare from start to finish, they never won anything with them, right? And then on top of it, they had to trade for James Harden to try to make Kawhi happier. And then they gave up more picks. This 2028 pick they have, it's probably going to the Celtics unprotected. It's like a Celtics Sixers. They get the best of the pick of however the pick played out. Speaker 1 (19:22) So even before they lose 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, that picks going to Boston in 28. So as a Celtic fan, I'll be rooting against Clippers next couple of years. But how do you reconcile all this with the fans? How do you get them to come back? What do you do? How do you think outside the box to make them feel good about being a Clipper fan again, especially tying in the last 50 years of this franchise and the fact that from the moment they moved to Southern California or started thinking about it. Speaker 1 (19:51) It's like somebody tossed a black hat on this team and it's never going to change. And if the outcome had been, um, sell the into a dome to the Lakers, move this team to Seattle. I just don't think there's a lot of tear shit. I really don't. And I, and I think what Ballmer did, um, with this team, um, where he was basically following the worst owner in the history of the league, history of the league, and one of the worst owners in the history of sports and somehow came up with, uh, with. Speaker 1 (20:18) an even worse outcome than anything from a basketball standpoint that happened with Sterling. So this is a disaster. I really think that there should be some outs for the fans because I think this is just bullshit. You root for a team, you pick a team, you're stuck with them. You're not allowed to divorce your team. So by the way, we're allowed to divorce real people, but not our teams. And if you pick the Clippers, you're just taking in the chin for your entire life. Speaker 1 (20:47) So how is that worth it? At some point, you got to come up with another choice for an NBA team. And honestly, I think it's right now for a lot of people. So yeah, I never thought the Clippers would find a new rock bottom, but I think they have. We're going to take a break. We're going to go to Charles Barkley. And Charles's audio and video was cutting out a little bit. So there's some video spots that we had to run a picture when his video stopped. But it's that you're going to enjoy it. He's great. And he's coming up next. The Bill Simmons podcast is brought to you by FanDuel. And guess what? FanDuel is now everywhere. Speaker 1 (21:26) I'm not kidding. It's everywhere. California, Texas, Georgia, Florida. You can finally get in on the action at home, the game, whatever the group is watching. It's all up to you. FanDuel makes sports more exciting because every fan can now celebrate your team winning or when the group chat calls the comeback. It doesn't matter what state you're in. Wherever you are, get in on the sports action with FanDuel. Download the FanDuel app today. FanDuel. Play your game. Age and location restrictions apply. Product availability varies by market. See Findo.com for eligibility. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. This episode is brought to you by one of my best friends in life, NFL Sunday Ticket. Man, I missed it. Kickoff's coming. Yeah, we're getting close. We're within a month. With NFL Sunday Ticket and YouTube TV, you get every game every Sunday. Speaker 1 (22:18) all in one place and it's magnificent. And there's no other way to follow the NFL season. I'm so mad I didn't get YouTube TV until a couple of years ago because it's the best. New users that might include you can get NFL Sunday ticket for eight payments of just $30 a month. You heard me correctly. New users pay $240 or eight, eight non-cancelable payments of $30 a month. First charge at purchase. Speaker 1 (22:45) Availability varies with NFL sending ticket for out-of-market games and YouTube TV for local and national games. YouTube TV required. Terms, restrictions, and embargoes apply. Commercial use excluded. No refunds. Charles Barkley is here on a Thursday morning, which we had planned, I think, for a couple weeks, not realizing that the biggest punishment in the history of the NBA was about to come down against the Sad Sack Clippers, a team that when you ended up in Philadelphia, you ended up with the Clippers pick. Because they had traded their first five years earlier for Jelly Bean Joe Bryant. And you end up with that. You could have been a clipper. I mean, you probably wouldn't even be talking to me right now. You might be living in like a one bedroom apartment in Alabama somewhere.