More than two months after it was initially agreed to, the blockbuster trade sending Kawhi Leonard from the Los Angeles Clippers back to the Toronto Raptors was finally completed yesterday. In exchange for the man who led them to their only championship in 2019 before bolting to L.A. after just one season in Toronto, the Raptors parted with all-star forward Brandon Ingram, guard Gradey Dick, two unprotected first-round draft picks, a first-round pick swap and a pair of second-rounders.
The reason for the holdup, of course, was the NBA’s investigation into a salary-cap circumvention scheme involving Leonard and the Clippers that was first revealed on sports journalist Pablo Torre’s podcast in September 2025. Since then, Torre and his team have continued to uncover evidence that the Clippers, who signed Leonard to a sub-maximum contract extension in 2024, funnelled money to him via sponsorship deals with team-aligned companies that required him to do no work whatsoever and were not even made public. Those included a $28-million US deal with Aspiration, a dodgy “sustainability” services outfit whose co-founder, Joe Sanberg, was later sentenced to 14 years in U.S. federal prison after pleading guilty to defrauding investors.
Following an almost year-long investigation conducted by the white-shoe law firm Wachtell Lipton, the NBA dropped the largest punishment in league history on the Clippers earlier this month, fining the team $30M and stripping them of five first-round draft picks. In addition, Clippers president of business operations Gillian Zucker and president of basketball ops Lawrence Frank both received lengthy suspensions without pay. And, perhaps most strikingly, owner Steve Ballmer — the former CEO of Microsoft and one of the 10 richest people in the world — was banned from all league and team activities for one year after Wachtell Lipton found that he “knowingly sought to help Mr. Leonard obtain off-court income opportunities and, in at least one instance, engaged in a significant act of team facilitation.”
At first, Ballmer and the Clippers vowed to fight the NBA’s ruling “through every avenue available to us,” and the owner’s lawyer called the investigation a “witch hunt” in a letter to commissioner Adam Silver. But Ballmer backed down on Sunday night, announcing he would accept the league’s punishment in a terse statement where he also apologized “for the distraction and distress this matter has caused” without admitting any wrongdoing.
Ballmer’s capitulation cleared the way for the Raptors and the Clippers to finalize the tentative Leonard trade, which was agreed to back in late June but could not be completed until the investigation and its aftermath played out. Less than 24 hours later, the deal was officially done. The Raptors announced it last night on their Twitter feed, posting a photo of Leonard in a red No. 2 jersey, accompanied by two words: “He back”.
Kawhi Leonard is back. <a href=”https://x.com/hashtag/WeTheNorth?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#WeTheNorth</a> <a href=”https://t.co/Rja9av2UYT”>pic.twitter.com/Rja9av2UYT</a>
For the most part, Kawhi’s return has been greeted with a great deal of enthusiasm by Raptors fans, the majority of whom seem very excited about the prospect of the 2019 Finals MVP reinvigorating a franchise that has won a grand total of one playoff series since he left — and none in the last six years.
And maybe he will. After all, Kawhi is a genuine superstar who averaged a career-high 27.9 points per game last season. The last time Toronto traded for him, he immediately delivered a championship. Surely, he’s still capable of doing it again in a league where the long-suffering New York Knicks are the defending champs and eight different teams have hoisted the Larry O’Brien Trophy in the last eight years. Right?
Well, I’m not so sure.
The case against Kawhi
Big picture, it’s easy to see why the Raptors wanted to make this trade. Top-shelf NBA free agents have demonstrated very little interest in moving to Canada, so the opportunity to reacquire a superstar who actually enjoyed his time in Toronto and was apparently eager to return (Leonard reportedly told the Clippers this was where he wanted to go) may have been too good for general manager Bobby Webster to pass up.
Plus, despite the size of the trade package, Webster didn’t really give up a ton. Ingram led the Raptors in scoring last season, but that was with a modest 21.5 points per game, and he showed in the playoffs that he’s not a championship-calibre fulcrum (reminiscent of DeMar DeRozan, who the Raptors shipped to San Antonio in the 2018 Kawhi trade orchestrated by Masai Ujiri, Webster’s former boss). Dick averaged six points off the bench. The two unprotected first-round picks are scary, but they’re so far away (2031 and 2033) that Webster knows they might be someone else’s problem.
The trouble is that the Raptors aren’t getting the same Kawhi they traded for eight years ago. Your eyes still see that same incredibly athletic, 6-foot-6, 225-pound physique. But Leonard is now 35 years old in a league that seems to get more and more brutal on the body every year, and the pioneer of “load management” struggled to stay on the court during his seven seasons with the Clippers. He lost an entire season to the torn ACL he suffered in the second round of the 2021 playoffs, and knee injuries knocked him out of the 2023 and ’24 post-season as well. In the six regular seasons Leonard did manage to play in with the Clippers, he missed an average of 25 games.
CBC’s David Common talks to Akil Augustine about Kawhi Leonard returning to the Raptors
There’s also the matter of Kawhi’s expiring contract, which pays him $50.3 million US this season — more than 30 per cent of the salary cap. The team is expected to sign him to a new two-year extension for around $124M any day now. He’ll be 37 when that one expires.
I also can’t shake the feeling that the Clippers and their fans are happy to see Leonard leave. L.A. not only failed to reach the Finals in the seven seasons since it signed Kawhi; they advanced past the second round just one time and won a total of three playoff series — none in the last five years. Imagine doing all that (alleged) cap-circumvention scheming, and taking all that risk, for a guy who ended up moving the needle so little.
Actually, Leonard may have inadvertently moved it quite a bit in the negative direction. Reportedly, one of his demands before signing with the Clippers was that they trade for then Oklahoma City Thunder star Paul George. L.A. agreed, and it cost them a huge package of players and draft picks including five unprotected first-rounders and a promising young Canadian guard by the name of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. While the Clippers floundered with Kawhi, SGA blossomed into a superstar, leading OKC to its first-ever championship in 2025 and capturing back-to-back MVP awards.
Hero or villain?
On top of all that, there’s now a tricky moral dimension to rooting for Kawhi.
If you read the Wachtell Lipton report, you’ll see that the investigators do not accuse Leonard of directly asking the Clippers for no-show sponsorship deals or other payments that might violate the NBA’s salary-cap circumvention rules.
But they do hold him responsible for breaking those rules via the conduct of Dennis Robertson, Kawhi’s uncle and business manager, who Wachtell Lipton says “pressured” the Clippers to help arrange such deals on Leonard’s behalf. (Back in 2019, when the Raptors were trying to re-sign Kawhi, Uncle Dennis reportedly asked them for the same type of deals — as well as an ownership stake in the Toronto Maple Leafs, who are owned by the same company).
Wachtell Lipton also found that Leonard failed to reimburse payments by the Clippers for personal expenses, including “hundreds of instances in which the team paid for personal air and ground travel, accommodations, gifts, and tickets” — another violation of the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement.
As a result, the NBA barred Robertson from doing business with anyone in the league for five years and ordered Kawhi to pay $700,000 for receiving improper benefits. That was Leonard’s only punishment, and a mere slap on the wrist at that, considering his $50M salary and the much heavier penalties meted out to Ballmer and the Clippers.
Kawhi is famously publicity averse, so it is plausible that Uncle Dennis arranged all these deals on his own, without the input or even the knowledge of his nephew. And, if we’re being real, Leonard is surely not the first (and probably not the last) star athlete to receive side payments like this. But he got caught. So, shouldn’t his reputation take some kind of hit among NBA fans?
At the moment, it appears not. Ballmer, with an estimated worth of over $155 billion, has predictably been cast as the main villain in this scandal, and perhaps rightly so. Meanwhile, Raptors fans seem happy to move on and celebrate the return of their hero Kawhi.
What remains to be seen is how long those good vibes will last.
