The former co -owner of Milwaukee Bucks, Marc Lasry, said that he did not believe that the owner of the Clippers, Steve Ballmer, had tried to bypass the NBA wage ceiling by working with a third -party company to pay overestimed superstar Kawhi Leonard in 2021
“This is not something I would never believe,” Lasry at CNBC told an exclusive interview. “I have always found it to follow the rules and do what is good.”
The journalist and animator of Podcast Pablo Torre reported earlier this month that Leonard had signed a sponsorship agreement of $ 28 million with a company called aspiration. The agreement obliged the attacker to the NBA to do nothing with the aspiration to collect money.
Ballmer has invested $ 50 million in suction. Torre reported that sources in the interior of the aspiration had told him that the agreement was that the clippers bypassing the league salary ceiling by paying more money to Leonard. The NBA began an investigation on the basis of its reports.
Lasry said there was always pressure to win in the NBA, but “there is no pressure to get around the rules”.
“In the NBA, everyone knows the rules. You follow it, and it’s because you know that if you don’t do it, you just have a lot of problems,” he said.
Ballmer and the Clippers denied the allegations of bypassing the salary ceiling. The aspiration has filed an early time this year and its co-founders were accused of fraud.
“I think it’s probably a lot of smoke, but I don’t think there is many there,” said Lasry.
Lasry agreed to sell his participation in the Bucks in 2023 to the owners of Cleveland Browns Jimmy and Dee Haslam in an evaluation of $ 3.5 billion.