The NBA issued its version of a death penalty to the Los Angeles Clippers on Wednesday for their role in a salary-cap circumvention scheme involving star forward Kawhi Leonard. The independent investigation conducted by the law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz "found a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations" by the team.
According to the NBA's statement announcing its punishment, Los Angeles facilitated endorsement deals between Leonard and some of its business partners, and induced "the companies to enter into these agreements by offering them business from the team. Central to that scheme was Gillian Zucker, the Clippers' president of business operations, who is being suspended without pay for one year "for being primarily and directly culpable for the impermissible endorsement arrangements and for providing false and misleading statements to investigators."
For those who haven't read the Wachtell Lipton summary report — and it is a doozy — allow this to be your guide as to who Zucker is and why she won't be working in the NBA at least for the next year.
Gillian Zucker's role in the Kawhi Leonard cap circumvention scandal
According to Wachtell Lipton's investigation, Leonard's uncle and business manager, Dennis Robertson, "requested a variety of impermissible benefits" for Leonard during his free-agency negotiations in 2019. (That has been corroborated elsewhere, too.) Within months of Leonard signing with the Clippers, Robertson "resumed his pressure on the team" to help Leonard "generate off-court income." Namely, "he expected the Clippers' assistance in obtaining approximately $10 million per year" for Leonard.
While he funneled most of those requests through president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank, he also spoke with both Zucker and team governor Steve Ballmer. None of them reported that to the NBA, as league rules require.
That alone would have been a violation of the NBA's collective bargaining agreement. But that's hardly where the trouble stopped for Zucker or the Clippers.
In June 2020, with the NBA temporarily shut down amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Zucker "made a series of email 'introductions' connecting Mr. Robertson to executives at three companies with which the Clippers were in active conversations about potential business relationships" across a six-day span. Within a few months, Leonard signed deals with all three companies totaling $18 million.
"In each email, in an apparent effort to create the appearance of complying with the circumvention rules, Ms. Zucker wrote that the connection was being made in response to a request from the relevant company for an introduction to Mr. Leonard," according to the summary report. "No documentary evidence supports those statements (and the evidence with respect to one of these companies contradicts it)."
Zucker was also key to establishing Leonard's relationship with Aspiration, the now-bankrupt environmental startup which was the first domino in Pablo Torre's Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting.
According to the summary report, Aspiration co-founder Joe Sanberg told Zucker that "he wanted to explore an endorsement agreement" with Leonard and asked for her help. She told investigators that she told Sanberg "that NBA rules prevented her providing such assistance, but the record establishes that she acted otherwise." Instead of just providing Leonard's contact information to Sanberg, she told him "that she would enlist a particular business agent to assist Mr. Sanberg in structuring the agreement—a business agent who was then under a retention agreement with the Clippers."
According to the investigators, Zucker reached out to the business agent the following day to help Sanberg. "Within minutes" of speaking with her, the agent "emailed internal colleagues with the subject line 'Aspiration and Kawhi,' which included proposed terms for his endorsement deal."
"Investigators conclude that Ms. Zucker improperly conveyed to the business agent the proposed financial terms contained in this email," the summary report says. "The agent told investigators that neither the agent nor the agent's internal team came up with those terms. And all relevant witnesses (including Ms. Zucker) agree that Mr. Sanberg could not have supplied them because he did not have any prior experience with structuring player endorsement deals."
So, the TL;DR version: Zucker went well beyond what's allowed under CBA rules in helping set up endorsement deals between Leonard and some of the Clippers' business partners. But why did she get twice as long of a suspension as Frank?
Why Gillian Zucker got a year-long suspension from the NBA
Zucker's willingness (or lack thereof) to cooperate with Wachtell Lipton's investigation appears to have resulted in her lengthier punishment.
"Key witnesses for the Clippers varied in their levels of credibility," the summary report stated. "For example, over the course of the investigation, Ms. Zucker made several statements that proved inconsistent with contemporaneous documents, other witness statements, and the broader chronology of events, professed a lack of recollection on important issues, placed responsibility on subordinated, and offered inconsistent renditions of facts in separate interviews."
"By contrast, Mr. Frank openly discussed with investigators his conduct from the relevant time period, recalled details of key events, took responsibility for the actions of subordinates, and was generally consistent across his interviews. While the determination of any consequences for the rules violations described herein lies with the NBA, investigators believe that it would be appropriate in making such determinations to take cooperation and credibility—or the lack thereof—into account."
Both Ballmer and Zucker told investigators that "the Clippers' sole involvement in Mr. Leonard's relationship with Aspiration was an introductory email," which the investigators found "clearly false with respect to Ms. Zucker."
As it turns out, lying to investigators is a bad idea, particularly when they have you dead to rights. Who knew?
The CBA limited Silver to handing out no more than a year-long suspension for anyone associated with this circumvention scandal. But given the scope of what the Wachtell Lipton investigators discovered, it's hard to imagine Zucker continuing to work anywhere in the NBA as long as Adam Silver is the commissioner.
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