The Kawhi Leonard homecoming is officially on ice. The Toronto Raptors and Los Angeles Clippers agreed on a trade for Leonard last week, and now that deal is frozen while the NBA finishes its investigation into how the Clippers have been paying him.
The Clippers put out a statement Thursday confirming the trade cannot go through until the league’s probe into Leonard’s relationship with Aspiration concludes. The NBA told both teams the Raptors would have to absorb any contract-related penalty risk if they finalized the deal now. Toronto reasonably said no thanks.
The Raptors added their own statement making it clear they still want Kawhi back in Canada. But the risk is too big to ignore. If the league voids Leonard’s contract as part of its findings, the Raptors would essentially be paying for a player they no longer have under contract. No smart front office signs up for that.
This investigation has been dragging on for about 10 months. It stems from allegations that Clippers owner Dennis Wong funneled money to Leonard through an outside company to skirt the salary cap. The Clippers have denied everything the whole way, and denied it again Thursday.
The problem for both teams is nobody knows when this thing wraps up. There are signals the investigation is in its final stages, but the league has not publicly committed to a timeline. Reports out of Toronto suggest the Raptors think it could still be weeks away.
What the punishment looks like if the Clippers are found guilty is anyone’s guess. Loss of draft picks. Fines. Suspensions. A voided contract is on the extreme end of possibilities but it is on the table, and that is enough to keep the Raptors from pulling the trigger on completing a trade they already agreed to in principle.
For Kawhi, this is a limbo period he probably did not see coming. He signed off on the return to Toronto, the city where he won his only Finals MVP back in 2019. Now he is still technically a Clipper, still waiting on a league bureaucracy that has taken the better part of a year to close the loop.
The Clippers get the worst of both worlds. They agreed to move on from their franchise player, which means locker room dynamics for training camp are already complicated. And they cannot actually get the return until the league says so.
Toronto is in a slightly better spot. The Raptors did not gut their roster in preparation for a trade they never got to complete. They still have the picks and players they were going to send back. Their offseason is not disrupted the way LA’s is.
The whole situation is a mess of the NBA’s own making. Ten months is a long time to leave a franchise-defining trade in purgatory over an investigation that should have wrapped by now. The league needs to finish this, one way or the other, before training camp starts and a mid-summer standoff turns into a full-blown crisis.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
