An unexpected NBA bombshell dropped on Wednesday morning, when The Athletic’s Pablo Torre accused the LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer of using a fraudulent tree-planting company to circumvent the league’s salary cap and pay Kawhi Leonard an extra $28 million in endorsement money.
The findings of Torre’s journalistic investigation made waves online, especially considering the extreme lack of NBA news in early September. He was all over the airwaves, making appearances on various podcasts, including “The Dan Patrick Show.”
During Torre’s chat with Dan Patrick, he hinted that his investigation of Leonard’s contract may not be his last along those lines. In fact, Torre may have one of the Boston Celtics’ biggest rivals in his crosshairs.
“It’s funny. My tipline has never been more used by enemies of Jalen Brunson,” Torre joked with Patrick.
The New York Knicks All-Star signed a team-friendly contract extension last summer, leaving $113 million on the table and allowing the franchise more cap room to improve the remainder of its roster.
“How he arrived with the Knicks,” Torre continued. “This is where I’ll have to defer to the reporting that I may or may not do on this. It certainly was interesting, right? Like, okay, that’s a pretty good deal for the Knicks.”
Sports investigator Pablo Torre says he’s looking into Jalen Brunson’s $113M paycut next 👀 pic.twitter.com/O029Gv9PiU
— Legion Hoops (@LegionHoops) September 4, 2025
New York’s star guard happens to be represented by Sam Rose, who is the son of the Knicks’ president Leon Rose.
Brunson has helped the Knicks avoid the same fate as the Celtics, so far
Brunson’s discount deal helped make it possible for New York to add both Karl-Anthony Towns and Mikal Bridges last summer -- a pair of moves that wound up making a difference when they met the Celtics in the playoffs this past spring.
Not only were they able to field a strong roster, but the Knicks were able to do so while remaining below the league’s second-apron line. Avoiding the harsh penalties that come with overspending is important for roster longevity. It’s something that Celtics fans learned the hard way this summer when the team had to trade away Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday.
“I think that the reality is that we knew going into this year, regardless of how it ended, that we were going to have some really hard decisions to make because of the penalties,” Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens said earlier this summer. “The second apron is why those trades happened. I think that those were pretty obvious. And the basketball penalties associated with those are real.”
Typically, when trading players of their caliber, Boston would’ve gotten a fair amount in return. Anfernee Simons is a fine player to get for Holiday, but when you do the math, the Cs actually had to give up a second-round pick to offload Porzingis and subsequently Georges Niang.
With the new CBA in effect, the Celtics had to be happy with resetting their finances.
There’s no concrete evidence that anything along the same lines as what allegedly happened in Los Angeles went down during Brunson’s extension agreement. There is, however, enough “good fortune” for the Knicks that Torre will almost certainly do some digging.