The Zach Lowe Show - Emergency Pod: Breaking Down the Clippers' Punishment!

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

Zach is joined by Kirk Goldsberry and Michael McCann to break down the massive punishment given to the Los Angeles Clippers. They run through the report and share their takeaways on the entire situation. Then, Sean Fennessey joins for a late-season edition of Mets Corner! (0:00) Welcome to The Zach Lowe Show! (1:41) Kirk Goldsberry and Michael McCann join the show! (6:00) This is the biggest punishment from the league ever (14:54) Let’s look back at how all this started (31:27) This could be Steve Ballmer’s legacy (37:24) Kawhi didn’t receive much of a punishment (51:20) Mets Corner with Sean Fennessey (52:44) Mets look better but still far from perfect (1:01:13) Things that have gone right for the Mets (1:12:13) Things that have gone wrong Host: Zach Lowe Guests: Kirk Goldsberry, Michael McCann, and Sean Fennessey Producers: Jonathan Frias, Billy Gil, and Mike Wargon Social: Keith Fujimoto and Michael Szokoli The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit https://fanduel.com/playwithaplan to learn more about the resources and helplines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility, and Optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. On a Wednesday night edition of the Zach Lowe show, the Wachtell Lipton Rosen and Katz report is out, and boy, is it damning.

At least in the NBA's view and frankly in mind and some other people is upon reading it. But the bottom line is this. The NBA has thrown the book at the Clippers. Five first round picks gone. $30 million fine. Steve Balmer. Microsoft's Steve Balmer. Suspended from all league activities for a year.

Multiple Clippers executives, including Lawrence Frank, the president of basketball operations, suspended for prolonged periods of time without pay. There's all sorts of stuff to get in on in terms of what the report found, why the findings merited such a gigantic punishment, really a death knell for the clippers for the foreseeable future. We've got Michael McCann, a legal expert, and Kurt Goldberry of the ringer, of course, to talk about Pablo Torre being right all along to how the penalty superseded everything that we expected. or anticipated it could be in why and what's in that report. All things, Clippers, Raptors, Kauai is going there. Apparently, we talk about that. Just, whoo, the moment that has been in the making for a year is here. And then after that, we talk about baseball.

John Fennancy and I are talking about the Mets as we wind down a depressing season with Pete Alonzo coming back to City Field in a couple weeks. That'll be fun. So that's all coming up on the Zach Lowe show. Welcome to an emergency edition of the Zach Lowe. show, the verdict is in. The NBA has thrown the hammer down at the Los Angeles Clippers in the Kauai Leonard Capp circumvention scandal broken by Pablo Tori. The penalties are the biggest in the history of the NBA and among the biggest in the

history of sports to help us sort out the whole thing, including the 36-page report, summarizing Wachtel Lipton, Rosen, and Katz's extensive investigation. I read it highlighted the whole thing. We have Kurt Goldsbury, our guy from the ringer. How you doing, buddy? I'm doing well. Great to see you again, Zach Lowe. And we have a legal scholar. He writes for Sportico. He teaches at the University in New Hampshire, among other places. Michael McCann,

sports law expert. How are you doing? I'm doing great, Zach. Thanks for having me on. So I'm going to go through a couple of quick headlines. You guys chip in whenever you want. I think by the time people listen to this, they will know the extent of the penalties, but just in case, the Clippers, having been found guilty by the NBA of Capsir Convention, have been stripped of five first-round picks, one in each of the drafts from 2029 to 2033. They have been fined $30 million.

Steve Balmer, their owner, has been suspended from all league activities for one year. Gillian Zucker, their president of business operations, suspended without pay one year. Lawrence Frank, president of basketball operations suspended without pay six months. They're going to be monitored more extensively. Kauai Leonard is required to pay a fine of $700,000. And Dennis Robinson, his uncle, is banned from conducting business in the NBA. Five first round picks. So headline number one is the clippers are somewhere beyond thudgeon.

I mean, this is like as harsh of a penalty as you could have imagined as they could have imagined. And they have released two separate statements today indicating that they are going to fight this somehow saying that the NBA changed its tune late in the game, saying that really all they are guilty of is introducing sponsors to Kauai Leonard and that they were under the impression that that was fine and even more sort of dire from the NBA's perspective, a little bit more. statement within a statement saying, if you spend $50 million investigating every team in the league, I bet you find similar things. We'll see because I think the report is much more damning than that. But let's, so, so headline number one is for an organization that has struggled for relevancy, basically its entire existence, this is pretty close to a death knell for a decade, a half decade. We don't even know. They're already rebuilding. The Kauai Lennar trade. will presumably go through now.

So they'll have Brandon Ingram and Grady Dick and picks from the Raptors and the Raptors get loaded up with Kauai. I think they're going to be really good. But I mean, as recently as yesterday, a front office executive from another team, not the Clippers, not the Denver, not the Denver, not the Denver, not the Superstars, who are about to come up. So, hey, the Clippers are kind of quietly positioned in themselves in case Yokic actually wants to leave Denver with lots of cap space and L.A. and all that. Forget that. This team is dead. Dead. No, no, the superstars ain't going here.

when they're out five first round picks and they can't put together real trades and all that. And obviously, Kirk, you and I have been talking about this summer of 2019 for eight years now. It was a failure of some magnitude once the era kind of petered out with

playoff losses in Paul George leaving in Oklahoma City winning a championship with Shea Gildes Alexander. And despite the fact that the Clippers made the only conference finals in the history of their franchise, not nothing. Yeah. It now goes down the signing of Kauai Leonard and the double sort of blow of the Paul George trade as one of the greatest catastrophic failures in the history of sports. I mean, what an opening. I think I speak for Michael when I applaud you on the opening.

But yeah, my first headline, I have five takeaways from this thing. My first thing is what you laid out. This is all about the clippers and the biggest punishment ever levied on an NBA team from the league office and the 80 year history of the league in terms of team building. Just a massive day in NBA history from that perspective. And it also brings us to the Adam Silver point of it all where, look, I was pretty cynical all summer long, as were many people I talked to. Oh, Adam's not going to do something that severe to Steve Baummer. No way. Well, throw that out the window. I was shocked when the thing came in because I had sort of prepared Zach Lowe for a much more minor punishment on the team building side here. I did not expect five freaking first round

picks to be stripped away. So all that smoke going back to August 17th on the ESPN article where a place you and I worked for a long time together. They had an article August 17th. Hey, they haven't found anything. There's not going to be much here. Well, how is that age, Zach? Not great. And to your point, if there were ever going to be a deterrent to the other 20, teams that not only do you not do the stuff that's outlined in this report that we're going to get to, you better have your situation so buttoned up that we can't even find like a dereliction of duty, an NCAA style, lack of institutional control, because we are going to come down hard when we find anything. Before I go on to my other takeaways, Michael McCann, I want to enlist you for this.

The Clippers have said they are going to fight in any way possible against this decision to reverse it, to get picks back, whatever it is. You do have been writing about the NBA Constitution, what it allows, what teams sign on to when they sign into the NBA, how the commissioner's word is kind of binding. Down at the footnote of the NBA's press releases that the Players Union has also signed off on this because they are Kauai Leonard's advocate and they basically accepted that punishment and moved on.

What can the Clippers actually do? Can they sue the NBA? What are their actual remedies here? Yeah, so the Players Association piece, it's going to get overlooked, and I'm glad you mentioned it, Zach, that's huge. Because it is saying the other member of this collective bargaining agreement is okay with this, that they're not contesting it. And there's no question that, although a $700,000 fine is obviously a lot of money, Quy Leonard comes out of this not looking nearly as bad as everyone else on the Clippers because he's not suspended. His contract isn't voided.

He's going to go on and play for the Raptors. he had to issue a press release where he basically blamed others. But I think he's not a winner, but he's clearly not the loser that the Clippers are in this situation. In terms of the Clippers' ability to contest this, good luck, because this is a private association. This is fundamentally sports leagues, pro sports leagues are like country clubs. They administer their own rules. They're given deference by courts.

And also, by virtue of buying or franchise, owners relinquish contractually relinquish certain rights in terms of the ability to sue. So they can issue statements saying this was unfair. This was procedurally invalid. This will lead to negative ramifications. But actually, this is the big problem, getting a forum, getting a court to actually hear any of this. And I think that's going to be the hard part for the clippers, is that they can challenge it internally to the NBA. they can say it's not valid.

And maybe at some point the NBA could reconsider the NBA with the Timberwolves. If you recall, they docked them five first round picks, but it ended up being three. So there was some reduction, mitigation, if you will, that occurred there. Maybe we see something like that with the Clippers, I don't know. But going to the legal system, unfortunately for the Clippers is going to be extremely difficult to do because they are in a club. At the end of this is really just a club. And as long as clubs administer rules that not in an arbitrary or capricious way, courts usually don't touch them. I'm glad you brought up Kauai's statement. I'm going to read part of it now.

Integrity and respect for the game are fundamental to who I am. I accept full responsibility for lapses in judgment by people within my inner circle and regret the distraction. The situation has caused the fans and my family. I answered into my contract with the Clippers as well as the agreements in question. faith, fully committed to fulfilling my obligations, and with no knowledge of any intent on anyone's part to circumvent the salary cap. You know, I find some of that at the very least a little bit hard to believe. Presumably, I understand extremely wealthy people have people managing their money and aren't monitoring their bank accounts like I'm monitoring my bank account,

but there's a lot of money flowing in and out of Kauai's account. At some point, you figure, like, how did this get here? What am I supposed to do for this? And like, it is a little bit of your responsibility or as a human to know what your representatives are doing to some degree, at least. So yes, he's getting off without, you know, a real punishment at all. The union surely fought for that. I don't think he comes off looking particularly good. I think he comes off looking pretty bad, but be that as it may. Headline number two from this is I was dead wrong like you, Kirk, about what I thought was going to happen here. I predicted when this first broke

and kind of mostly kind of stuck with it that it would be a slap on the wrist that they wouldn't find a quote unquote smoking gun. I remember I think with you, Michael, a year ago, I talked about maybe a few second round picks in a fine or one first round pick in a fine. Obviously, I was dead wrong. And Pablo Torre is the big winner here.

His reporting was assiduous and thorough all along. and none of it was refuted by anybody at this point at all in even a minute detail. But I do think one of the reasons why the slap on the risk prediction and the one first round pick or multiple seconds or whatever was wrong is there was all to talk about the smoking gun. And there wouldn't be a smoking gun. There wouldn't be a paper trail. And that's why it would all just be circumstantial evidence. We poured over the three of us, the clause in the CBA about circumstantial evidence and what that could allow the league on its own to do. circumstantial evidence is not even mentioned in this 36-page report that we all read today because

they didn't need it. If there's not a technical smoking gun in here, I don't really know what qualifies this smoking gun. There is so much damning direct evidence that they didn't need any circumstantial evidence. And this is what I want to go to you, Michael. You're the legal professor. you know, there's, there's interviews, there's emails, there's texts. This is something of a magnitude. And there's stuff that predates the aspiration scandal, which is the entry point for Pablo's podcast and all of this. This, I don't know if there's, there seems to be a lot of smoking guns or things similar

to a smoking gun. Like there's stuff in here that if the recounting of the. interviews and the conversations is correct and accurate that is just damning. I mean, I don't know of any way around it, but maybe I'm being overdramatic. You tell me. No, you're not being over really dramatic because I've seen reports like this. And this is maybe the most damning report I've seen in pro sports of a team, particularly, as you said, Zach, in terms of direct evidence. Again, this is represented as us, whether it all would prove true in court. We don't know, but we're going by what we're reading. I would also say that you mentioned you and

thought it would be a modest penalty. I was there with you. And also ESPN was there with you based on that article we read last month. It certainly, clearly the leaks in that story were not from the NBA based on what we just read today in this report. So it wasn't as if the world was expecting five first round picks. I think the NBA community, the sports law community, if I may speak for it, nobody was expecting this. So this was stunning. And that report, it's by the, the NBA community.

walk tell, which is a top law firm that's going to get its ducks in order before it releases the report. Why did it take so long? Because they made sure there's a report like this. That's really hard to refute. Now, maybe some of the things in that aren't true. We don't have access to that information, but this was an extremely damning report. Obviously, the clippers say it's untrue and they're going to argue that. I don't know if there's a forum for them to argue that other than the public forum. But this was a pretty, I don't want to say impressive, but it's impressive in the sense that it was so comprehensive. Let's just dive into it then, because when we talk about stronger evidence than we were previously aware of, I think people who aren't going to

sit down and read it should know a little bit about what's in there. So even before aspiration, the trees, all of that in 2021. The Clippers, Kauai signs endorsement deals with three different companies. Dactronics, which Pablo has talked about, Boingo, the wireless company we all sign on to at airports, and an insurance company called Lockdown, not the Lockdown Podcast Network, just Lockdown, that I had never heard of before. This is in June 2020. And one of the common themes, and Gillian Zucker is the sort of headliner here in terms of the frontline person who's committing

the against the NBA rules conduct. We'll talk later about what Balmer knew, what he didn't know, what the report actually says directly about Steve Balmer, who's suspended a year. But one of the commonalities with these three companies and with aspiration is Gillian Zucker writes emails introducing Dennis Robertson and or some Kauai representative to representatives of those companies who are interested perhaps in paying Kauai for some sponsorship deal. And in all the emails, she words the emails as if all of those companies have previously asked her, hey, we would love to get in touch with Kauai Leonard. Can you do that? And the league, the investigators find no evidence of any prior contact to that nature of those companies

reaching out saying we'd love to partner with Kauai. In other words, the league has concluded that Gillian Zucker was retroactively writing these emails after introductions had already been made often by the clippers to make it look as if she were simply responding to those inquiries that had already come in from those companies. And the NBA says, or the investigation by Wachtel says no documentary evidence supports those statements. They can't find any prior contact. Yeah.

And in fact, in fact, what they find in a lot of cases is that the clippers have already kind of started the ball rolling. But that's step one, like the absence of those proactive e-mails. is like a big feather in the investigation here. I was just going to add, like, when the report starts to really get going, Zach, there's this. Also, we have to go back to March and April of 2020. And I thought the Walktail report did an incredible job of contextualizing three or four of these deals unfolding at a time where America is in crisis. Nobody's doing any business.

And the report cites the three of these deals that the Clippers had sort of set up for, Kawhi happened in the heart of the pandemic. They go so far as to say nobody's doing any other endorsements in pro sports at that time. There's there's no, the deals moved very quickly, unusually so. And there was no expectation of any return of work in any of the paperwork they found. So I think that was another part of that saga, Zach, that I just thought was really interesting that they, they had pinpointed this in 2020. And much of Pablo stuff was later.

than that. Well, let me just be even simpler. What's, what's outlined here is basically a quid pro quo. These companies pay Kauai Leonard for an endorsement deal for which he does nothing and none of them have any real history of having celebrity endorsers of any kind or athletes. And in return, right as those deals are signed, the clippers pay these three companies consulting fees, fees for consulting. In a couple of cases, they get the entire consulting. In a couple of cases, they get the entire consulting fee up front in multiple payments of $10 million each, according to the report, despite the fact that these companies have no history in the consulting business, that the services contemplated by the consulting agreements are not worth what the Clippers

were paying for them. And one person from one of these companies says, at some point, here it is, a credible witness with direct knowledge told investigators that the consulting agreement, one company signed with the Clippers was, in fact, a ruse design and intended to be a vehicle for the team to provide the company with funds to be paid to Mr. Leonard. In other words, just a simple sort of exchange. You endorse Kauai Leonard. We do some business with you. And the most glaring example is Dactronics, which is the scoreboard thing.

And I don't want to get too far into the nitty gritty. But Dactronics was bidding for work on the Inuit Tunes scoreboard, right, Michael? And the Clippers say, hey, you know what would be? great is we think you're good. We'd like to hire you. And now I'm going to read from the report. The team wanted to agree on a spendback arrangement whereby Daktronics would provide business back to the Clippers. Ms. Zucker suggested to a Daktronic senior executive that this spendback could be accomplished through an endorsement agreement between Dactronics and Leonard. Dactronics believe that failing to enter into a commercial relationship with Leonard could

jeopardize its ability to win the bid for the win into it. So they do, in fact, strike an endorsement deal with Leonard. And here's the damning part. In May 2020, in a call with a senior executive of Daktronics, a senior Clippers executive specified the precise financial terms that the Clippers expected Daktronics to provide to Mr. Leonard in the endorsement agreement, $3 million per year for two years. And then a little bit later in February 2021, the Clippers executive told, Daktronics, that because the team had decided to increase the amount it would spend on the scoreboard.

Dactronics should correspondingly increase the amount of money it would pay to Mr. Leonard. That's just in fancy terms, right? Michael, that's like quid pro quo is what's being alleged there, right? Yeah, and I think the key part here is that the Clippers do not appear to have had a rebuttal to this. I mean, if I'm the Clippers, I'm going to argue this is not unusual. other teams arrange or play a facilitating role in star players getting endorsement deals with sponsorships. It's not as if Leonard is the only player to have an endorsement deal with the team's sponsor.

It happens in soccer. It happens in Major League Baseball. So the opportunity, I think, was there for the Clippers to say, okay, what you're saying sounds suspicious, but in fact, this is how business is conducting. And from what we read in that report, it doesn't seem like the Clippers provide of that, or at least it's not, from what I can tell, stated in the report. That would be really contextual evidence that this is not unusual, that this is standard practice. And we don't see that. We actually see it said that this is highly suspicious, highly unusual, a typical other NBA

teams don't do this. And I think that's hard for the clippers. Well, that's their statement, right? is that like we're just simply introducing Kauai Leonard to sponsors and helping facilitate. Everybody does that all 30 teams do that. The NBA knows that. They even name check Rick Buchanan, in the NBA's general counsel saying Rick Buchanan knows this. But the report, when you have an executive telling Daktronics that because, hey, we're spending more on the scoreboard, you got to spend more on Kauai,

that's well beyond the conduct outline there is well beyond introduction and facilitation. And there doesn't appear to be another example. I think that's the most, that's the most damning thing. for the Clippers is that they can't say, oh, yeah, the Celtics do that. The Rockets do that. If they had that, that would have been very powerful evidence. And it doesn't appear based on what we know they do. Kirk, you wanted to say something?

I just want to add, like, don't forget, like, if a lot of us who would work with Kauai in Toronto or San Antonio had to pick which NBA player might get caught up in something like this at the end of last decade, a lot of us would have picked Kauai Leonard because of Uncle Dennis. You know, coming out of the Toronto free agency period, there was a lot of smoke reported and otherwise about what Uncle Dennis was asking for from Toronto. There was reports that he would ask for inappropriate things from the Los Angeles Lakers in that same free agency period. He wanted a stake in the Maple Leafs, man.

Like they were asking for crazy stuff. Everybody knows that. It's been written about publicly for years. I just think it's vital context here, especially to Michael's point, that, oh, you can't really make the everybody does. this when we have like a seven-year run of this intinuation that that uncle dennis is the one doing this at the highest level in the NBA like this is the guy who was at the center of it in 2019 and appears throughout the early 2020 Zach Michael did you have a chance to read the

section that we'll turn to the on aspiration specifically and how that deal was arranged according to the report I skimed it before I went on this so yeah um did anything stick out to you from there. I mean, I can go through it myself. But again, I don't want to get too into the weeds. But there's an email, I think, dated November 5th, 2021, which is one of these emails I'm talking about, where Gillian Zucker writes to Joe Sandberg,

whoever it is, aspiration, saying, hey, you asked for an introduction to Kauai's people. Here it is. But then the NBA goes back a week or 10 days before that. And there's all this dialogue involving Gillian Zuck and a, quote, business agent retained under retainer from the Clippers who serves as a middleman with aspiration about how much the company should be paying Kauai Leonard. And then that email is sent, but the wheels are already in motion by then.

Am I reading that right? Yeah. And I think this is the part where the Clippers lose the argument that everybody's doing it, that there's a middleman, right, negotiating endorsement income for a player. it sounds like in the college sports context sort of pay for play, right? NIL being used as a way of funneling additional money.

It reads like that. And also, we don't know of other examples of that. I don't know of any other team that does anything. Maybe it happens, but I don't know of it happening. And it doesn't seem like the Clippers

had another example that they could provide it. One of the reasons why I think this took so long this investigation is that there was so much stuff to go through. and they know that any error would be amplified by the clippers. And if it turns out there are factual errors in this, the clippers will certainly run with it. But I don't see an avenue legally for them to go too far. I mean, just here's what the report says.

Based on the foregoing evidence, investigators find these statements to be inaccurate at best with respect to Mr. Balmer. And they're talking about the statements Steve Ballmer made to Ramona's show. on national TV. And clearly false was respect to Ms. Zucker. The Clippers suggested to aspiration that they enter into an endorsement agreement with Mr. Leonard, asked a business agent to help structure the agreement, conveyed proposed deal terms to that agent, i.e. how much money, provided input on the proposed deal and on and on like that. And then the quid pro quo comes with this what they call the forum agreement in the report, which is the clipper. pay aspiration some amount of money to do sustainability stuff with the forum. And there's all

kinds of text messages and emails in here making it clear that at least in the minds of aspiration, these two deals are connected to the point that when the forum deal is not being signed as quickly as an aspiration people would like, Mr. Sandberg from aspiration, texts the business agent acting as an intermediator for the Clippers. Quote, if the forum agreement isn't fixed, I will tear up the Clippers contract. We will do nothing with Kauai and we will go to litigation. Should I call Dennis and Kauai and tell them that the deal is off because we got fucked? That's a direct quote.

If this isn't signed, here's another one. If this isn't signed by tomorrow, there will be no choice but to do that. The Kauai deal is not happening without this forum deal. That's another text from Joe Sandberg. and then they have Clippers executives by name. Scott Sondenberg, Clippers chief commercial officer wrote in a March 22 text messages with Eric Chan, then the Clippers CFO. I never wanted this forum deal, always knew it was super shady, another text from the same guy.

I cannot begin to tell you all the red flags with this deal just doing what I'm told. I mean, that's not great. Can I say one thing? Yes. And not I'm not taking the Clippers side by any means, but if you recall, The NFL had a very damning document of the Patriots during deflaking. A long report with exhibits, with statements, with emails, and the Patriots fought back. They released their own report, the Wells report in context.

I'm not saying it's going to happen here, but Steve Ballmer has a lot of money. And it wouldn't surprise me if we see a rebuttal document released maybe this week, maybe not long after that, that tries to attack and how will they attack? They will say, you have that email, but why didn't you include that other email? You have that text, but why don't you include the whole sequence of messages in that text? That's a common device used to at least create a cloud over the allegations.

Because right now, the Clippers, they're going to lose five first round picks. It's really tough to change that. But I think they have professional reputation. Steve Ballmer's legacy, right? Like he has to be thinking about to, he can't now say I did it. That's got that, that, that's gone because he's already said he didn't. So I think he's kind of boxed in where he has to fight back. Um, I do think I would be very surprised.

I mean, the Clippers have said we're fighting this. Whatever form that takes, I don't know. Look, I can tell you like, no one from the Clippers has been willing to speak on the record about this since it happened other than it orchestrated press conferences where Lawrence Frank at the beginning. the season has to answer questions about it, et cetera. Kirk, I'm sure you can attest to this too. Like on, like on other bases, this is not news. They've been adamant that they did nothing wrong. I've had relationships sort of sour, if not splinter entirely, simply by asking questions.

They were so offended that anyone would even impugn them with questions. And I was like, okay, I mean, I guess that's how it's going to be. they've been adamant, adamant, adamant, adamant. And this report is, you know, maybe some of them didn't know all these texts and emails were in here. But like that adamant, if that's even a word, I would expect something from them. But I mean, I said last week, they are going to have, if they want to be really sort of exonerated or even nearly exonerated from this and now the opposite has happened, they have to find some explanation for why this money is flowing in this direction when no one else is funding this. company when the timing of like the Dennis Wong payment lines up. And you just can't say we found nothing.

You have to actually show us why. And I that's not happened. And this is the why seems to be outlined here. Yeah. And you know, the statement they released today, uh, was very vitriolic. Uh, it used the term podcaster for really sort of in a derogatory manner, multiple times, uh, sort of demeaning Pablo and his reporting, which I didn't think was the right most professional tone.

to strike if you are going to come out to Michael's point and try to credibly, you know, refute the material here. And I sent the Wachtel report to some corporate lawyers I know here in Austin, Texas, who are really sort of fancy lawyers. And like, this thing is legit. Like, this is a legit report. They spent a lot of money on it. In fact, we learned that the Clippers supported some of that investigation fund. But I think they're boxed in. And in that statement, though, they also reference what Michael was saying. Like this is Steve Balmer's legacy. Like when we talk about Steve Balmer in 20 years, Zach Lowe,

and we're these old white-haired guys talking on podcasts, this is his legacy in the world of sports. This is just a huge moment for one of the richest men in America. And what happened today, in my estimation, with this report, is the National Basketball Association pretty much called him a big old cheater to his face and said, here are the receipts. And that's a humiliating thing for anybody, let alone somebody is proud and as powerful as Steve Balmer. Hey, Kirk, I mean, you pointed out, going after Pablo, what's the point of that?

Like, if you're the Clippers, that's not the target right now. Going after Pablo Torre, he made his case. The NBA said it's true. And in fact, the NBA said it's actually much worse than what Pablo Tori said. So going after him, it's a waste of time. for the clippers. They should focus on, is there other evidence that's not in that report that somehow disproves or at least clouds what's alleged? Because if they don't have that, I don't know what their tactic is. I want to go back to the aspiration paying Kauai and the Clippers then

striking this forum deal, sustainability deal with aspiration, money flowing both directions. and then the impatience at aspiration when that sustainability deal was, I guess, slowed to be funded or whatever. This is a text from Eric Chan, who was the CFO of the Clippers at the time. And read into this what you want, right? This is one of the things that if the Clippers wanted to sort of say, well, this actually should be interpreted this way, they'll do that. This is the text, quote, Steve Balmer knows that when this deal blows up, Joe is calling Kauai and telling him his $12 million deal is no longer because of the Clippers management right? I think so, but just double checking. And then the Wachtell report continues. Mr. Balmer told investigators that he was aware of Mr. Sandberg's threat not to move forward

with the Leonard aspiration endorsement agreement if the Clippers did not timely execute the forum agreement. So unless I'm reading that wrong, Michael, that says in plain English, he told Wachtel, yeah, I knew he was threatening to blow up the Kauai deal. if we didn't move forward with the forum deal with him. That, I don't really know what that is, but it's, it's, it's knowledge at the very least, right? It's showing they're acting together. I mean, if I'm the NBA, I'm going to say, this is all one big business arrangement with different pieces. One piece is between aspiration and the clippers, the others with Leonard, and they're all moving

together. They're all in unison. They're not separate entities. And that, that message seems to support that. blunt too, as you said, Zach. It's not like there was a lot of room for wiggle room there in a statement like that. And it doesn't seem like they had, I mean, this is the thing. If they had a response to that, the report would have it. Because the report, the NBA knows Balmer is going to come after this report in every way possible. So they're going to try to preempt any potential

arguments. And the fact that we don't see that there, to me, is a very notable omission. Let's take a very quick break and then wrap it up with some sort of conclusions about what, who knew what? In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19 speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility and Optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca.ca.

Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian new vehicle total registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Football is back. Every game, every weekend, Draft King's Sportsbook has you covered. Every snap matters. Every comeback can shift the game and every fourth quarter moment can change everything. Follow the action with Draft Kings, the number one sports book for live betting. Built to keep up with a speed of sports. Built with Canadian sports fans in mind. Draft Kings brings the action together in one easy-to-use app. Follow the biggest matchups, build your parlays, and explore live betting markets as the game develops. So you can focus on the football and enjoy the action with confidence.

Download the Draft Kings app today and see what everyone is talking about. Draft Kings, the number one sports book for live betting. In partnership with Draft Kings, the crown is yours. Gambling problem? Call connects Ontario. 1866-531-260-19 and over. Physically present in Ontario. Eligibility and restrictions apply. See Draft Kings.

com slash sportsbook for details. Please play responsibly. Number one sports book for live betting based on available live market data. Michael, to your point about Balmer's reputation and Kirk your point about Balmer's reputation, I mean, the interesting thing is to actually sift through this report. We're going to have more time to do it in the coming days and say, what does it actually say that not Gillian Zucker, not Lawrence Frank, not Dennis Robertson, Joe Sandberg, what exactly did Steve Balmer know.

There are a couple of things that are indisputable, according to the report. Number one, the report says, look, man, he lost control of his operation at the very least. And that's like, that's obvious, right? Number two, at the very least, he knew it says explicitly. He was aware that Dennis Robertson was asking for stuff that ran a foul of the CBA. And the NBA bylaws say, you must report those asks to the legal office and

Steve Balmer did not do that. Other people didn't do it, but Steve Balmer also didn't do it. I mentioned that his TV interview with Ramona Shelburne was deemed inaccurate at best, meaning the best possible interpretation Wachtell can make is he was dispensing inaccurate information perhaps unknowingly, but that's at the at best means maybe maybe worse. And then there's this other thing of, you know, Steve knows this deal below. up. He was aware Mr. Sandberg's threat to blow up the Kauai deal if the forum deal blows up. That's like that's the that's the Balmer part of it. And even beyond that Kirk, I mean like,

you know, we kind of joked at the beginning of this. Like, of course it's the clippers. Like if this is like if they're hammered, I remember saying something like if they're hammered multiple first round picks, fines, whatever, it might be time to just move on as a friend, just move the franchise somewhere else, whatever it. Like, it's just absolutely cursed. Nothing good has come of it. And like, I mean, that's the legacy of the Clippers is, is, unless this is fought or overturned successfully, whatever is Donald Sterling and this with like some good basketball here

and there in between. And then a whole shit ton of losing an Elgin Baylor on the lottery day. So, I mean, I don't know what else to say. Yeah, I think Adam Silver's, you know, 11 year career as commissioner 12 year is now bookend. by two terrible scandals in the Clippers organization, very different scandals. But I think he's handled them both pretty well.

But yeah, dude, this is a big, another black mark on the LA Clippers. You brought up who knew what and when, and one thing we haven't talked about, and my biggest takeaway right when the punishment came out, guys, was,

man, the NBA just levied the biggest penalty on a team it's ever done. Five first round picks, $30 million, all this other stuff, Zach's outline. Kawhi Leonard, not suspended.

Kauai Leonard finds $700,000. According to the Wachtell report, some of these relationships gave him easily eight figures of added revenue for no show work, as Pablo is outlined. You know, we live in a world, Zach Lowe, and this story I know is close to your heart. Jackson Hayes got suspended one game for pushing a mascot in February of 2026.

the player at the heart of this story. I think it was it was G. Wizz. Let's let's name who it was. It was G. Wiz, okay? Yeah, I don't want to, I don't want to trigger G. Wiz with that awful memory of Jackson,

just sort of, it was more of a check than a shove. But I'm just saying, Jackson and Hayes got suspended more than Kauai Lennard in that, in that context. So I wanted to ask you, Zach, were you just as surprised at Kaui Lerner, not getting any kind of suspension here?

No. Cynically, no, because the focus is going to be the team and the representation. But like I said before, like, I just find it hard to believe that he knew nothing and was, like, completely ignorant of this. But it does have me thinking, like, first of all, we've already talked to particularly Bill and I about, is this the weirdest career in the history of the NBA? like two-time finals MVP, a legit MVP candidate. Like I voted him for MVP in 2017. At the peak of his powers,

one of the three to four best players in the league for a prolonged period of time, when he was healthy, but never healthy all the time. He's got 16,000 career points. That's sort of a middling amount for someone of his stature. And now there's this.

And I tried to put myself in the shoes of a Raptors fan. I'm like, sweet. The trade goes through, like awesome, I think. But now this guy's just like on our team and we're going to pay him. And yeah, Uncle Dennis is gone. I guess this is what like if I guess this is what you do as a fan. He's room for the team. But it would feel a little bit, a little bit weird for me.

And Kauai's entire career feels just completely bizarre from start to finish, including the mystery injury thing in San Antonio where apparently he was upset at how they handled the injury and what the second and third opinions were and all that. It is strange and it would leave me if I were a Raptors fan a little bit like, all right, I just got to like put this in my side of my brain that I don't really activate for a while and just cheer for the Midrangers. Well, just one more point on that. There's people in San Antonio that I know very well that saw this coming. Dennis was a problem.

I won't do the rhyming nickname. Dennis was a problem starting around 2017 when Zaza-Pachulia stuck his foot under, Hawaii Leonard in the Western finals in the game I was attending and very disappointed to lose. That was the day a lot of people who are very familiar with the situation say that things started to go sideways in San Antonio. Dennis started to become a main character. So you map out Kauai's career. I think the demise really starts in 2017. There's obviously a big pinnacle in 2019, where he wins the title in Toronto. And then Dennis takes him into free agency and they're asking for all sorts of stuff.

But I think, like, unfortunately for Kauai Leonard, who was my favorite basketball player on the planet for a number of years, Zach, his inner circle, to use his words in the statement, really let him down in the prime of his career and really led some damage, added to some damage that might not otherwise have been there. And it's really a sad story, honestly, when you talk about the, the strangeness of Kauai's career, but this is a blemish to your point. I think it's a blemish, but this could have been so much worse for him. I mean, this report eviscerated Steve Balman.

Yes. It goes in very personal ways goes after Clippers' executives as being unprofessional, unethical cheating. With Leonard, $700,000 fine. As you said, Kirk, it's less than what some players who make a lot less have had to pay out for other things. I wonder how they arrived at that number, right? Like there's clearly been some backdoor negotiating with the union.

And in a way, this is a story about the union. That this is the union fighting for a high-profile member in a way that proved effective. I think Leonard walks away. He goes in place for the Raptors. It's bad for him. I'm not saying he's cleared. But of the people mentioned this report, he seems like he received the least amount of scorn when it's hard to believe that he didn't know what was going on.

I would say something else. When we were thinking about this scandal, I focused on Joe Samberg being somebody who was a criminal, had off to prison and not a reliable figure to base an investigation on, that the NBA had interviewed him, but they had all these other people that they talked to. I mean, that's the striking thing is that the scope of sources of information for the NBA was much more extensive than I think.

think anyone was expecting. And that goes to the fact that it took so long, but they took their time and it paid off. Well, Pablo Torre's thing from the beginning has been, use your brain, everybody. Like money is going from here from point A to point B and then back to point C. Use common sense. What else could there possibly be? And then gradually, he found a whistleblower complaint, he found other things to back that up. But at base, he would say, what does logic tell you what was going on here? And the caution, I think, was, well, I'm not sure that, like, logic is going to be enough for the hammer hammer. It'll be enough for something, but not the hammer hammer. And what the NBA has in this report is more than logic about in in Wachtell's view,

in the investigator's view, about how and why that money was going from point A to point B to point C. They have emails and texts and dated emails a certain way and backdated emails a certain way and all that, that outline that sort of buffer or bolster, rather, the logic that Pablo was positing the whole time. That's the way I basically read the report is his argument all along was, why is this money moving this way? Why else would it be? And the NBA said, well, here's some stuff. Here's some emails sort of backing that up. And here we are. Like you said, Michael, maybe this may not end.

I mean, I guess the Clippers will do, I just don't know. Like, there's no arbitration procedure for them, right? No, this is an internal matter for the league. They can always sue. So you began the show by saying, could they sue? Sure. And they have plenty of money. You could always file a lawsuit.

But suing and then having it dismissed because they've agreed to arbitrate would allow people to ridicule them further to say, look, they did it. I mean, the Patriots were totally opposed. to deflakeate, but they never sued because they knew it would go nowhere. They knew they play in a club. This is, this is just like a club of very rich people. People mentioned this sort of doomsday scenario for the league and other entities. Do you see in corporate scandals a lot of like, well, if you sue, well, then that's going to just compel all this documentary evidence that nobody wants out. That's not the case here you're saying. There's no way they can compel documents from like this team and that team and on any of that. Because that requires getting

past a motion to dismiss. So if the Clippers sue, the NBA will say this should be dismissed on the basis of they have contractually agreed to the NBA having final authority on this, there is no forum for them to bring their claim. The only forum would be within the confines of the NBA. And it's really hard to get around that argument. So what you're referring to is pre-trial discovery. That's only going to happen if it gets past emotion to dismiss. And I see that being really hard. Now look, Balmer, if you hire five huge law firms and you pay them a gazillion dollars, they'll come up with something. But it's very telling that the Patriots didn't sue and that other teams don't sue. And there's, by the way, just not for nothing, there's other,

like the Clippers have extra first round picks in some of these years from trades that they've made, including I guess this trade that's going to go through with the Raptors. I just got a text from someone saying, hey, the Celtics are a big winner today. And I'm looking back at the picks that the Celtics own. And they have this sort of best of pick from the Clippers or the Sixers in 2028. And we're going to have to get a full accounting of like which picks the Clippers are being stripped of. I reported earlier today that one of them is the Pacers pick in 2029, an unprotected

Pacers pick that they got in the Evita Zubat's deal. That pick just vanishes in the thin air. Now the Pacers don't get it back. But there are other teams that have shorted the Clippers, basically. and could benefit from that. And I'm going to have to go through all of that. Ooh. Anything else we haven't gotten to?

Either of you guys wanted to hit on this big picture, small picture, Michael, legalese that we should be paying attention to, anything we missed? You know, one thing was the fear that if the Clippers are punished, it will chill the market for players to get endorsement deals with team sponsors. And that is something that I could see that the Clippers could argue that this is actually detrimental to players. But I say that knowing that the union has agreed to this. So that undermines that argument that this is somehow going to make it harder for players to get as lucrative as endorsement deals. The fact that the union signed on to me is a huge part of this. Yeah. And the flip

side of that, Zach, to your earlier point of everybody does this, and sort of the flip side of what Michael just said is, man, I talked to people all year about this saga. And you know, you ask executives around the league. Does everybody do this? Most of them say, hell no, we're too scared to do it. If they had done the slap on the wrist, that low, if they had just done, hey, two second round picks and whatever, suddenly Carl Anthony Towns could take a lot less in New York and get extended and get a big sponsor with the sphere in Las Vegas

or something like that. I think this now will scare a lot of teams in the future from trying to get cute and paying max players, more, free agents more, with these circumvention techniques. I think Adam Silver gets a win this week with this because I think it will legitimately scare other teams from trying to cheat like this. Well, and again, like I never, the team sponsor, player sponsor thing, again, we can find a number of NBA players who have individual deals with teams, with companies who sponsor

signage at the arena, whatever. I just never thought we would get a report that said, we actually, we can say that Wachtell can just declare this in a report that a Clippers executive specified the precise financial terms that the Clippers expected Dachronics to provide to Mr. Leonard, $3 million for two years. That's the report saying, no, no, we have evidence. This law firm, reputable, argues in front of the Supreme Court law firm has evidence that a Clippers executive, told a company how much to pay Kauai Leonard. And that same Klipper's executive told Daktronics, hey, we're spending more on the scoreboard than anticipated. You better up your deal with Kauai.

I just never thought, however it got onto the record, whether through interviews or in some cases, emails, that we would see a trail like that. I mean, that is like, okay. I mean, good luck explaining that one. This is why you do those things in phone calls, not in messages. That's right. Right?

Like this is exactly why you don't leave an electronic trail. And it's kind of a lack of sophistication that happened. I mean, it's to not leave wiggle room, I think, is also. Well, some of it is kind of, I mean, they interviewed like, I can't remember how many people. It's like 270-70-something. There's either 200 interviews or 200-70-but some of it is in emails and text. And some of it appears to be from interviews where people cooperated. Anonymous executives, apparently one of them from the Clippers cooperated.

So how that each bit of information gets to the law firm is you'd have to do some work to trace it all. But they have, they have like, hey, this is our evidence. This stands up. And this is where we go from here. And like, I never, this is, I mean, this is as big a sports scandal as we're ever going to cover if this penalty holds or even if it's just chipped away out a little bit. And it is a death knell for the clippers for the foreseeable few years. future. Not that they had any great. I mean, I guess they have Keaton Wogler. That's cool. But I don't know. We'll learn more about this as as more stuff happens as reaction comes out as the Clippers do what they do. Kirk Goldsbury and Michael McCann, you guys have been helping me out from the very beginning of this.

You are very busy. Michael, particularly you've got other like you've got NIL stuff going. There's like a lot of stuff happening in the in the sports law slash business world right now. So I appreciate you taking the time. and Kirk, I always appreciate you taking the time and I have a feeling we have not heard the last of this, but thank you guys. Thank you. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025.

Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19 speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility and Optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility, Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025

for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Do you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siaia and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better.

Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem. It's time to talk about everyone's favorite National League baseball team, the New York Metropolitan's. It's Mets Corner. Sean Fennessee, it's been a while. It's been a month.

I went on vacation for a lot of that month. The Mets suddenly got hot. They are now 19 and 15 in their last 34 games as we're recording this on Wednesday after a very irritating loss to Freddie Peralta and the Tampa Bay raised. A loss I caused by talking shit on my podcast Monday about how much I was enjoying Freddie Peralta's continued failure. And then, of course, you just threw that one right in my face. Now, that brings us to since the Halcyon days when the Mets were 45 and 24 to start last

season, we are now 100132 in our last 232 games. We have the fifth worst record in Major League Baseball this year ahead of only the A's, the Angels, the Giants, and the Rockies. And we got Pete Alonzo coming to town in about 10 days. And so I guess I would start with 19 and 15. Boy, it felt for a while like the Mets were legitimately kind of hot. That's not that great. Did we all get a little too happy about what was going on

in this little mini stretch within a longer season and a half stretch of misery? I never tricked myself into thinking that we were actually turning things around. So I think it's okay. There was a moment that was roughly 10 to 12 days long after the trade deadline, where the team was legitimately very fun to watch. And I will cherish that 10 to 12 day stretch when I look back on this season, as I look back on many failed seasons and say, well, there were glimmers of excitement.

And there is a lot of positivity that we can talk about with the team. Some things are actually going well. And there is a case for optimism for next year, deranged, though that might sound and who knows will even have baseball. But I feel even at 19 and 15, being decent to close the season does have some value. Now, should anyone feel good at all about the way that things transpired over the last, what did you say, 232 games? 232 games with 100 and 132. I mean, that's putrid. It's a 43 winning percentage.

430. It's not good. Yeah. I mean, just think of the, how many, how much did each win cost during that period with pro-rated salary cap? That's got to be some of the lowest value you're ever going to get out of a salary in the history of Major League Baseball, right? Yeah, you know who is among the lowest bang for the buck players in my brief reconnection to Major League Baseball? Jorge Polanco. And you know what I've been thinking, Sean, when I think of 62 and 77 in 19 and 15, I think of two things.

I think of the 12 game losing streak from early in the season. We went from 7 and 4 to 7 and 16. I just think we could just go on 5 and 7 instead of just falling flat on our faces and staying down for three straight weeks. We kind of would have a normal-ish season. Not only that, Pete Alonzo's return

on September 14th, 12 days from now, I bought two really good seats for that game. I think I'm bringing my daughter. We're having a kind of a family conference where the phrase, it's a school night has been uttered a couple of times. And my daughter doesn't really care. He is going to get such a hero's welcome because all that dude does is hit. He just hits and hits and hits and hits.

And David Stearns and his equations or whatever Pete Alonzo once said, when you're doing your equations, I'll be up for the Hall of Fame. I think it's formulas, is what he was saying. Formulas, the formula, the formula I decided that he wasn't good enough to continue playing first base. The Delta between Pete Alonzo's current season and what the Mets got from Jorge Polanco has got to be like one of the biggest Delta's player left player signed to theoretically replace that player in the history of the baseball. If we had just had Pete Alonzo playing first base, that's like four wins, five wins right there based on how bad Polanco was now, Jared Young. has been pretty solid, and I think one of the nice stories of the team, but he's going to get

a hero as well. I'm very interested to see what the atmosphere is going to be like. It's obviously going to be great for him, but it's going to be kind of a fun night at City Field. I'm going. We're going. Yeah, it's that unique scenario where someone left because they were offered a better deal, but we don't hold it against them emotionally because we have a big relationship to Pete and the strategy that the front office, which does not have a lot of supporters right now, saw it was at least in the short term, clearly not the correct one. Now, I wouldn't say I'm surprised by the season that Pete is having. He's 31. He's a power hitter who was ostensibly at the end of his, like in the kind of the final two to three years of his prime. He's been such a consistent player over the years. He's had maybe

one and a half dramatically down seasons. But otherwise, he's kind of metronomic. 30 and 100, hits somewhere between 245 and 265, gets on base just enough, strikes out 180 times. And he's just having a Pete Alonzo season. He's going to have an 860, 870 OPS. He is one of the three or four best power hitters of his generation. And that's it. Now, maybe we can feel a little bit better about it when he's 33 or 34 and is dramatically declining and striking out 200 times and not walking at the rate that he's walking at

this year. But that's two to three years from now. That's not right now. Right now we want to win. And we want to win with Francisco and Indoor and we want to win with Juan Soto and we want to win with the thrilling psychopaths and Nolan McLean and Christian Scott. And he would have fit really nicely in this team. So it's really painful to know.

Now, just very quickly, though, even if we had his four or five wins, we'd still be seven games back to the wild card lead. I get it. It hasn't gone great. I would just like to have those four or five wins and just maybe a couple other things break right. And we're around 500. And like these games feel like they matter instead of like, well, you know, I kind of

don't mind losing to the raise because it screws the Yankees. and I kind of don't mind losing to the Orioles because I want Pete to make the playoffs and the Orioles are making this like late, improbable surge toward one of the last wildcard spot. But here we are. It's going to be fun. I can't wait to go to the game. It's going to be a lot of a lot of long ovation. So he'll be my love, you know, he'll always be in my heart. You know what really else is really hurting me on a daily basis? I'm going to have to, I put Jeff Passon on my tweet alerts for the trade deadline because we made a lot of trades. We did.

might have to take him off because, like, three of his last four tweets are about Pete Crow Armstrong doing historically amazing things. And I'm like, I don't need this shit in my life. I'm aware that it's going on that he should be a met. And one of my best friends is a Cubs fan. And every time I share one of these tweets with our baseball text thread, which is a few of us, he tweets back an emoji. He's made a self emoji. Like it looks like him curly hair and glasses, just shrugging or smiling. And I'm like, I hate this. Jeff Pass. I'm going to have to unfollow you. Stop tweeting about it.

Zach, it's such a tough one. And I don't know if we've really had a deep and meaningful Pete Crow Armstrong conversation. But this season at least, he looks like Mickey Mantle. Oh, my God. And this could only happen to the Mets. It really could only happen to the men. I really don't think that's overstating things. Like, I think from a tools perspective, he's going to win the MVP.

I know, I know. It's very, very difficult. I mean, this is five years ago now that that trade transatlating. inspired. And we kind of brushed it aside because he seemed to have like kind of an up and down rise through the minor leagues. When he was traded, you have to remember, he had played, I think maybe 15 professional games total and was injured. So even though he was a first round pick and a big time prospect, it was very, very early on in his professional career. But over the course of the last, the first half of last season and the entirety of this season, he just looks like a generational

superstar. He looks like a Hall of Fame style player. And that's insanely difficult to accept because how perfectly would he fit in a universe with Carson Benj and AJ Ewing and we can move Juan Soto to either first base or D.H. long term. And then is that not one of the most exciting young lineups in baseball? And, you know, we got 68 games of Javier Baez

and Trevor Williams. And Hobby Baez actually played incredibly well after he was acquired by the Mets. In fact, maybe his best stretch of his career was in that 68 games. But it also led to the Francis Kolin Dorth Thumbs Down moment and a team that failed to make the playoffs. And the general manager who made that trade was let go

because of a DUI incident. And it's, it is, it is why we have low metts. It is, is it there also, now you're, isn't there also like a assistant GM or GM sexting incident or like inappropriate text messages incident? That was, yeah, That was Jared Porter. He preceded Zach Scott.

This was all in the same season. This is good. I mean, really. Those were dark times. You were not, you were not yet in, right? When that was happening, that was right before you came in.

But I was aware the scandals break through the media barrier. Okay, enough, enough belly aching. Sorry. I am very excited for this peak game because we have good seats. And also, if you remember, the low moment of the season was probably the game.

I think it's all the same game where they make six infield errors. They trade David Peterson during the game or before the game. And the crowd is chanting Pete Alonzo because they have no other way to express their discontent. Well, now he's going to be in the stadium for the first time he's running. He's hit a home run. He's the all-time Mets home run leader. We decided who cares about that. Okay, let's be positive. I'm going to list some good things, legit good things that if you care about the Mets going forward, these things have happened during this last couple of months. Are you ready? I'm ready. Chime in whenever you want. Number one,

Nolan McLean, legit number one or worse number two starter. I think the last six starts have proved that he has genuine top 10 ace potential. Number two, Carson Benj, completely legit, optimism within the organization that the power uptick is coming for him. Just looks like he's going to be an awesome two-way player for a very long time. The game where he had two assists in one inning from the outfield was just absolutely delightful. he is a gold glove caliber fielder. And I want you to weigh in on this. You think he should be right there for rookie of the year.

This guy, Weatherhold on St. Louis is the odds on favor now. But McLean is also technically a rookie. I forgot that baseball does this thing where in the NBA, if you play a second one season, you are no longer a rookie. Maclean is still a rookie. Yes, McLean didn't qualify. He only started eight games last season. To me, actually, I think McLean has now surpassed Benj,

because Benj's just out of quiet five days. And this sort of stuff changes very quickly. and is very volatile. Weatherholt was the odds-on favorite for a long period of time because he got off to a hot start and is like a historically skilled second baseman. So his defensive metrics are through the roof. And so his value is really high

because they're not a lot of good second basement in baseball. So you might look at his like counting stats and his power and his batting average and it might not seem very impressive relative to some of the other competitors. The other guy who's in the race is Sal Stewart, who's the first basement for the Reds, who is who kind of looks like Pete Alonzo. He's already hit 30 home runs.

he's going to have 100 RBI. He's like the more of a traditional rookie of the year winner, circa 1995, in terms of what we were looking for in Superstar Sluggers. So you've got those two guys, and then you've got Benj and McLean. And Benj is a five-tool right fielder who has an outside chance,

maybe not even an outside chance, to go 20-20 in his rookie year and has an elite, elite, elite arm. And obviously that Padres game that you're referencing when he had the two assists in the first inning was, that might have been the highlight of the season for me for the season. I think

what McLean is doing now, though, is even more impressive because he's had a really bizarre defensive lineup behind him all season. He's had a very, very unsupportive offense behind him. And he's also struggled with command

throughout this season. He has this weird thing where you can kind of tell in the first two innings, whether he's got it. I think he's near the top of the league and hits pit batsman. And yet, when he struggles, he still is able to kind of persists through some of those things to give you six or seven innings and seven or eight strikeouts. And, you know, I think he's given up like one run in the last 30 innings or something.

I mean, he's in a really, really, really special place right now. So the fact that both of those guys are in the conversation, Bode's great for us long term. Benj, though, just has a charisma that you love as a fan. He might be a, he might be leading the pack right now for Zach finally buys his new match jersey player. It might be Carson Bench. I think he's the best candidate at the moment. We're not quite there. Okay. Other good things that have happened.

Francisco Lendor is all the way back offensively. Defensively, where you just continues to be a complete mysterious disaster. He's made two horrible errors, one of which was somehow not scored an error on a sure thing double play where they got none of the outs on a double play a couple games ago and then botched a grounder last night. Don't really know what's going on there. This is by far his worst defense of season ever looking at any metric error is advanced metrics. all of it. But offensively, he's all the way back from the hand injury, from the other injuries that he missed time with. And that, that's fantastic. And by the way, my highlight of the season was his diving catch to save the Brewers game the other day, where of course, again,

in something that could only happen to the Mets, the broadcast went Sopranos style out black, right at the moment where Lindor was about to make the catch and left everyone wondering, oh, this is probably the Mets. I'm sure it hit off his glove and everybody scored for the Brewer's no, he actually caught the ball. He's all the way back. Wait, can I just say one thing about that? Yes. The only thing that was disappointing about that was in the immediate following inning, he got on base to start off the inning in a tie game and then got picked off the first base. And it was such a microcosm.

Third bad pickoff that meant. Youing has had a couple of bad pickoffs too. It's like, what are we like, this is the fundamental stuff of just like, you don't move the runner over. You don't score the runner from third with less than two outs is the stuff that's been. And I don't know, like, I don't know why that. seems to be a team-wide affliction and I don't know like how you coach those things as a baseball manager and hitting coach but like we just

don't do any of those things. You got to remember we lost our extremely successful first base coach Anton Richardson in the off season due to some sort of like inability to give him the benefits that he desired in a contract negotiation and then he went to go to the Braves who are now like 35 games over 500

and we didn't have a lot of pickoff issues last season and Juan Soto stole, like, 35 bags. So I was going to sort of have his steal this entire season after suddenly going 40-30 last year. Not very many. Yeah. I mean, in general, they've taken a big step back.

Ewing has a ton of speed and so he's aggressive and so he makes mistakes sometimes. But, yeah, the pickoff was maddening because that catch was so electrifying. Ewing isn't a major slump, but I'm not worried about him. He's legit. And a lot of his outs in this major slump have been very loud outs, hard hit outs, including a line drive that I thought was going to kill Dusty May, the Brewers pitchy there. that just hit him right in the back. Bo Bichette looks pretty Boba Shetty. I know you just can't forgive him. You're all the way out on Bo Bichette. He's been pretty Bauda Shetty since like June 1st.

It sounds like he's going to opt into his deal for next year. I'm all right with that. I like that you have, you just don't, like he's going to have to hit $450 for like three months for you to forgive Boba Chet. I like that he's your irrational blind spot. He is the big villain of the season for me. And it's, I'm sure he's a good guy. And I'm sure he's, He's played every game. He's kept his head up through this extremely disappointing season. So I don't want to attack him. But when they went through that 12-game losing streak, Juan Soto was injured.

And it was on him. You know, like it was really up to him to step up and fill a gap. And he didn't play well at all during that period. And he didn't play well at all in April, May, and June. And he ticked up in, or excuse me, maybe he had a hot June and a quiet July. And then he had a hot August. But the one thing that I'm looking at with him that does worry, me, given that he has a $42 million salary, is that his extra base hits this year are way

down, way down, career low sort of percentages in terms of his slugging. And so even though he has had, he had a really good August, he still has a 700 OPS, which is just not good for someone of his caliber of player at his salary. And if he is actually entering a phase where he's just more of a singles hitter and a very skilled singles hitter, but a singles hitter, then that's problematic for next season, because there's already an absence of power in terms of Pete Alonzo. You made the note about how Polanco was signed in an effort to fill the Alonzo power vacuum, but so was Bo, you know, like that was part of the idea.

And Bo is never going to be a 35 home run hitter, but he could be a 25 or at least a 20 home run hit, and he could hit 45 doubles in the season. And he's not having that kind of year. And I do think that between the super shaky starting pitching of relying on guys who've been in the rotation for the last few years who we know we're not built for it, Peterson, Manaya, Senga, those guys who just, they weren't going to be long-term solutions.

And guys like Bo just not playing at the back of their baseball card, that's what put the team in this situation this year. Yes, Bo has 23 doubles, 44 last year. Doubles are sexy, man. I love doubles. They are. Rowan loves the triple, ever fetishizes the triple. They're so rare. I love a good double.

Senga, maybe he can be a productive reliever and salvageable. He's been fine. And we'll get to the starting pitching. I'm going to lead the starting pitching to the side for a second. And the minor league system seems to be restocked after the trade deadline, although Clay Holmes has been unbelievable for the Cubs. I'd like to resign Clay Holmes so that we can get Jefferson Rojas and Clay Holmes and just steal everything.

That would be nice. I'm looking at Billy Amic stats in AAA. He's hitting home runs there. This guy, Petrie, I kind of like. Cam Rojas is off the charts. Mitch Void is hitting well. And Jonah Tong has allowed two or fewer earned runs in seven of his last date starts and maybe called up by the time this podcast comes out on Thursday.

Those are all very nice things. And there are other guys. I'm like checking to Stafura. I'm like looking up his stats. Gary Gill Hill. I haven't rooted for someone based on how fun their name is to say in quite a long time. I would love for Gary Gill Hill to be a part of my life. So I can go around just saying, hey, you see Gary Gil Hill last night?

and he takes the hill. There's dad jokes built in. All great. I am also feeling very good about that. I can't help but just look at the metemarized Twitter highlights of guys who may never make the major leagues hit bombs. Like I think Billy Amick has 35 home runs in the minors this season. Call him up now. I think he struck out like 190 times.

So, you know, the thing, okay, let's like, let's do glass half empty glass half full with this stuff because it's kind of interesting. If you go back to the most recent sell-off, I guess was 23, they acquired a ton of prospects. Everybody felt pretty good about that, dismantling the Max Scherzer and Justin Berlander's situation, you know, moving on from David Robertson, a number of other pieces. And Billy Epler made a lot of those deals and picked up Louis and Helicunia, Ryan Clifford, you know, a whole host of guys who at the time were like top 10 prospects in the systems of the teams that we were trading with. And we felt like these are pretty good gets for guys who were not going to be a long, long-term part of the system. And none of those guys really panned out as major leaguers.

Some of them were used in deals to make other acquisitions. I think it's possible that Jefferson Rojas is the long-term second basement or third basement of the New York Mets. He seems like a legitimately like a tier prospect. He's a top 100 prospect. Every other guy that we've acquired, as cool as they seem right now, is probably just a lottery ticket. And I wouldn't be surprised if most of them are used to acquire a couple of big ticket names in this offseason. That's just where my head's at with most of those guys. So I'm not going to, I'm trying not to get too attached to them. Well, Acuna was used to acquire Louis Robert Jr., who as soon as he got hot and started

actually playing the Mets just waived him to go away. And so someone else had to pay him. That was fun. I enjoyed the Louis Robert Jr. era. Now he's Mallory Rubin's centerfielder or whatever he's going to be. I hope he helps them and Pete, you know. Like one thing he can do is hit 425 foot home runs. That's something that he clearly can still.

Everything else is kind of up for debate. Okay, let's go on to things that are bad. The Mets are 26th in OPS, 27th in runs, 29th in doubles, and 30th last in on base percentage. They do not get on base. Marcus Simeon does not get on base. He stinks. Brett Beatty does not get on base.

He stinks. Francisco Alvarez, I'm nearing the end of my rope, man. I'm nearing the end of my rope. Are you just not good? Is this just what it is? He has 110 strikeouts in 316 at bats. He's grounded into 16 double plays. He cannot resist a high fastball to save his life and swings and misses at all of them.

And I'm getting antsy. You know, I've been an Alvey guy. Catchers with pop are just like, you know, one of my white whales, I can't, I can't give up. I'm about ready for Luis Torrance to just be our catcher because that guy is rock solid behind the plate. He doesn't drop balls. No one tries to seal bases on him. He's actually not a bad hitter.

Those guys don't get on base very much in addition to the other guys who don't get on base. Mark Vientos does not get on base. He's about, are you ready for this? Like, oh, he's hitting home runs in the minors. He came up. He hit a home run immediately. He, I'm just prepping you right now.

He's going to hit eight home runs in the next 25 games and trick us again into thinking that that guy from 2024 is just around the corner. He doesn't get on base. I sound like freaking Billy Bean and Moneyball. Give me people who get on base. We are 30th and on base percentage, and we're just terrible at it. Mania has gone back into a slump after looking pretty promising. He's been victimized by some bloopers and ground balls that just get through the hole and some errors,

but he's also given up a lot of home runs. And I just still don't know, and this is where I need you to weigh in. I don't know how much I can really trust Christian Scott and Zach with no H. Thornton as like rock solid three, four level starting pitchers in next year's rotation. Christian Scott has been actually pretty good statistically. Thornton there's this interesting debate about the luck adjusted pitching, right? Like his fielding independent pitching ERA or whatever the number is is higher than his actual ERA to a degree that is unusual. Well, what are your, Andy Green was asked about this before one of his reasons starts. I don't really know what to make of it.

I don't know. I'm getting a look like, this happened with Peterson where it's like, oh, he induces a million double plays. That's great. And as soon as that stops happening, he's traded to another team and he's not good. Okay. I will address that very quickly on Terence versus Alvarez. Luis Terence currently has, is 0.006 behind Francisco Alvarez in OPS right now.

Point 0.06. That's a stonest. given that Luis Torens has no reputation as an offensive player. And Francisco Alvarez was once the number one prospect in all of baseball because of his ability to hit. And weirdly, Terenz has like crazy opposite field power. Like all of his home runs are through the opposite field. There's something's happening with them.

I hope it's an evolution. It might just be a blip. It's hard to say. As far as Thornton and Scott go, the thing with Thornton is he's a soft tossing, low profile lefty. So that's okay if he's your number five starter. And if we pick up a big time ace in the off season and we bump him down in the rotation, that's not a problem, and I think he's a great change of pace in the rotation.

Christian Scott, on the other hand, he looks like the kind of guy who should be atop of the rotation dominator, but maybe he doesn't have the same, I don't know, mental fortitude that it seems like Thornton has, where when he gets into trouble, he kind of lets go with a rope in the fifth inning and kind of let games get out of his hands. So I guess we'll have to wait and see. I'd love it if they were penciled in at four and five, and Nolan McClain was at two, and they picked up a one and a three, but picking up a one and a three is not easy. You know, it's going to require a lot of cleverness in terms of acquisitions. Sean Maniah, I like the guy.

He's 36 years old. He's entering the final season of a deal that he probably wasn't worthy of in the first place. He seems like a great teammate, but I never believed his little mini streak of quality pitching that he showed us in August. It's going to be a really interesting end of season for Tong because there's no reason not to call him up now that he's really steadied in AAA. Boy, would it be nice if he showed us five starts of like, all right, this guy could be in the rotation next year because here's zooming out, like given the payroll and given the guys

at the top of the org chart, Lindor, Soto, throw in Bichette if you want, McLean now, the pedigree those guys have or are establishing, it would be nice to build a team that had, I'm not talking like expected win totals, but that had legit like if things, go right, 90% of things go pretty right, this team could win 90 games. Like, that shouldn't be so high a bar, but this team won 83 games last year and they fell on their face even trying to get to 83. They're going to win in the 70s this year. And it just feels like, yeah, some of these nice things are all happening at the same time. Presently, if all those nice things continue happening, I could see the team winning like 84 games next year. But like the team should be better than that.

And I hope whatever is happening right now does not make ownership, Stearns complacent about like if there's a season next season, knock on wood, there's still a lot of work to do to get this team to a point where it's like, oh, yeah, I could see this team being like a pretty solid playoff team. Would you, would your mind be changed if they went out and signed Tark Scoobel and re-sign Clay

Holmes and traded for Yandi Diaz and added another bat? And would you immediately start feeling like this is a 95-win team again? Yeah, because those are like four awesome players. Yeah. I know, but they're coming, they're coming off of like a historically disappointing two-year period for the franchise given the expectations. And Stearns is basically going into his lame duck period.

You know, like, if he doesn't make it happen, it's over. And we're starting a new administration. So like stuff's going to have to change. Like they can't sell the fans on, well, you had a lot of bad luck. And they did have a lot of bad luck. Well, we had only 105 games from Soto and 105 games. and 105 games from Lindor. And, you know, Bobuchette took a while to get adjusted.

And we took a chance on Lubav and we took a chance on Polanco and they didn't work out. And, oh, you know, we were really hoping Senga could turn it around. And we were really hoping Peterson in a contract year would make it happen. And, you know, all of this kind of calculated risk that went into the philosophy of team building for the squad this year almost across the board failed. And so there has to be, I think, almost like a public pivot from, the way that the team was built

the previous two seasons to show the fan base. Now, I'm not necessarily sure I'm in favor of giving Tark Skubel $800 million. I don't really think that's a good idea, but I do know that they have to do something to get us to be like, okay, fine,

I'll re-up my season tickets, and I will spend countless nights in the dead of summer devoting my emotional well-being to this team. So I expect dramatic changes, but I also don't know, like being too dramatic, often doesn't work in the Mets' face,

So it feels like a paradox as well. I mean, scoble is pretty awesome. He's the best. You know, and he's about to turn 30. You know, all those contracts are bad ideas. At some point, we just have to embrace the bad idea long contracts to get good. And by the way, have to rebuild the entire bullpen, even though they've somehow continued to be really good after they traded the entire bullpen.

My guy, Nate Lavender, I always said, Sean, I always said, I believe in Nate Lavender. Is there a way to get Lavender and Love Lady in the same bullpen? That seems like a tag team that should happen in a goofy bullpen. But like Nate Labner, is he giving up a run yet? I don't think he's giving up one run. That honestly sounds like a 1970s porno, Lavender and Love Lady. Dickey, who's got Dickie Love Lady now? Somebody has them.

I saw him pitch recently. Yeah, was he on the Yankees or the Nationals or who picked them up? I don't remember. Like, one thing we can all agree on is let's just not having Yankees, Dodgers World Series. Let's have somebody else get involved. Can I get any thoughts from you on the Dodgers situation? Like, well, where do you want to go with it?

Obviously, I'm very familiar because of the Lakers sale. But like, are you are you, are you, are you asterixing their two world series titles? Are you hoping that there are, is it like are they going to, are they going to sell and or not spend to keep guys like school bowl? Like, where are you at? I guess my question for you as somebody who's pretty sophisticated and understanding how some of these things work is, do you feel that this will auger a dramatic change for the future of that franchise, which then I think kind of really shifts the axis of power across all of baseball. It can't help. Then again, they're insistent that they're not selling the Dodgers and the team just prints money to such a degree that,

including the little wrinkle that Jeff Passon talked about this week, who I have to unfollow, unlike superfollow on Twitter about how their TV money is not included in revenue sharing the way it normally would be. So it feels like they have a pretty big cushion. They're obviously going to have another long playoff run this year. They feel kind of insulated, but the tentacles of this are still spreading. It's certainly like we can hope. Like I can, we can all hope and dream that maybe someone shakes loose from their, from their team. By the way, also kind of nice that we didn't get Kyle Tucker in the end. Although I say that he's probably going to hit like a critical grand slam in game two of the World Series this year. I mean, to say nothing of your boy, Edwin Diaz. I mean,

I'm sad. Is there a worst contract in the sport right now? It makes me sad. I like it when Diaz. I do too, but I don't really get it. That went as bad as it could possibly go. I guess we got to give Stern's credit for that. Like, he steered away from that to some degree.

Like, they made a pretty commenser at offer. The Dodgers beat it by some amount. I don't remember what it was. So they didn't totally steer away from it. So maybe he gets no credit. I don't know. But yeah, that's, but relievers are so weird. Maybe he'll have a great, you know, fall and great next season.

But if you want to be kind to Stern, about this season, in addition to some moves that didn't, you know, he didn't make. He built a hell of a bullpen. Yeah. He had been historically renowned for being very good at that. And this was a year where he did spend a lot of money. You know, he spent, these are like 10 million plus players in Minter and Weaver and Williams and, you know, high profile relievers, but they pitched well.

And I'm hopeful that he can do the same thing next year. I just, I never, I got. sentimental about Alonzo really fast, which is why I'm going out of my way to go to this game. Because his home run is really what brought me back into being a fan. The excitement of that game in Milwaukee, that dramatic home run. And I knew who he was. I knew about the 53 home run season, whatever it was. Like I knew about him, but the coincide, the coincidental timing of me getting laid off from the worldwide leader, the Mets being in the playoff run of that home run happening in that circumstance, that got me back in. And so I got sentiment.

about him fast, but like, it just isn't surprising that a 31 year old absolute masher at first base is going to be an absolute masher for like three more seasons. And yeah, his fielding is not going to be great. He's a first base. And the whole point of him is to hit a bunch of home runs and a bunch of doubles. And it's not surprising that he's going to do that. Like he's, he's having a better year this year than he were about the same year this year as he did last year, which was better than the year before that, which got everyone concerned. I don't know. That one, I just, I can't get by what is the plan at first base? If not that, what was the plan? We talked about it last year. Like the guy was so important to our offense all last year. If we don't bring him back,

what's the plan? Well, this is the plan. You're 62 and 77. Yes, Soto's hurt. Lindor got hurt. They did their injuries. They missed a lot of time together and separately. Okay, great. You know what? That makes you a bad team. And like for the payroll, for this market, for this fan base, we deserve a roster going into next year that again is not like, hey, if this cute little frisky bunch of guys all clicks. They could be 85 and what, 77 or whatever the math is. Like, we deserve an actual real team and there's a lot of work to be done. Preach, brother. I'm, you know,

I couldn't have said it better myself. All right. Maybe I'll get my bench, my Benj Road Gray. At least we have him. He's a beautiful boy. We got him. He really is good. Yeah, he might be the E. or McLean are the two leading candidates. All right, Sean Fennacy, the big pit. What do we got coming up on the big picture? I'm flying to Telluride, Colorado in 12. 12 hours and I'll be at the film festival there and I'll be reporting back from it on Tuesday.

So I'm looking forward to that. What's today? When so like five days in Telluride? Four days in Tyleride? Yeah, four days. How many movies in five days? The plan is 20. Oh my God.

Wow. If I can get to 18, I feel good about it. Because I try to make the most of the film festivals. Otherwise, why go? I'm not going to party. I'm going to see the movies. We'll do what ends up being higher. Fenisies Telluride movie counter,

Carson Benj's final home run count for the season. John Fennessee, thank you, buddy. We'll reconvene on Metz Corner soon. I'll report back from the Pete Alonzo game, and it is a school night, but I don't care. John Fennessee, everybody. Thanks. Thanks, Zach. All right, that's it for tonight's edition of the Zach Lowe show.

Thanks to Michael McCann and Kirk Goldsbury for jumping on on short notice once this Clippers report came out. Thanks to Sean Fennacy for jumping. on earlier today to talk about the New York Metropolitan's. Thanks to Mike, Billy, and Jonathan, as always on production. And thanks to you all for listening to and or watching the Zach Lowe Show. At this point, we'll probably

be back next early next week, Monday or Tuesday with a new episode of what's going on in the NBA looking ahead to next season. Thanks a y'all for tuning in and enjoy the Zach Lowe's show. 21 or over in President Select States for Kansas in affiliation with Kansas Star Casino or 18 and over in President D.C., Kentucky or Wyoming

gambling problem. Call 1-800 gambler or 1-800 My Reset. Call 1-888-78-9-777 or visit ccpg.org slash chat in Connecticut or is it MDGamblinghelp.org and Maryland. Hope is here. Visit Gambling helpline, MA.org or call 800, 327-50-50 for 24-7 support in Massachusetts. Or call 1-8778-Hope-N-Y or text Hope NY in New York.

For Louisiana, call 1-877-7-7-8-67. Football is back. Every game, every weekend, Draft King's Sportsbook has you covered. Every snap matters. Every comeback can shift the game. And every fourth quarter moment can change everything. Follow the action with Draft Kings, the number one sports book for live betting. Built to keep up with the speed of sports.

Built with Canadian sports fans in mind. Draft Kings brings the action together in one easy-to-use app. Follow the biggest matchups, build your parlays, and explore live betting markets as the game develops. So you can focus on the football and enjoy the action with confidence. Download the Draft Kings app today and see what everyone is talking about. Draft Kings, the number one sports book for live betting. In partnership with Draft Kings, the crown is yours.

Gambling problem? Call Connects Ontario. 1866-531-260-19 and over. Physically present in Ontario. Eligibility and restrictions apply. See Draftkings.com slash sportsbook for details. Please play responsibly. Number one sports book for live betting based on available live market data.