Clippers exec's texts called Forum deal 'super shady'

One of the sharpest details in the Clippers report came from inside the building.

A Reddit thread highlighted Wachtell's discussion of internal texts from Scott Sonnenberg, then the Clippers' chief commercial officer, to CFO Eric Chan in March 2022. The messages were about the Forum Agreement, the arrangement in which the Clippers paid Aspiration for arena sustainability work while the report framed related business as part of the path that funded Kawhi Leonard's endorsement income.

The blunt line is the hook. Sonnenberg wrote that he never wanted the Forum deal and always knew it was super shady. In another text, he said he could not begin to describe all the red flags with the deals and was just doing what he was told.

That is damaging because it cuts against a clean-business explanation. These were not outside critics reading the story backward after the NBA announced penalties. The report presented them as contemporaneous messages from a senior business executive while the deal was being handled.

The larger NBA finding has already moved beyond rumor. The league penalized the Clippers, Leonard and several team officials for salary-cap circumvention violations, including five forfeited first-round picks from 2029 through 2033, a $30 million team fine, a one-year suspension for Steve Ballmer and a five-year compliance monitoring program. Leonard was ordered to pay $700,000, and Dennis Robertson was banned from team business for five years.

Sonnenberg's texts help explain the tone of that punishment. The NBA said the Clippers initiated off-court income opportunities, facilitated endorsement agreements and induced companies doing business with the team to enter those arrangements. When a senior executive's own texts describe a related deal as shady and full of red flags, the league's institutional-failure language becomes easier to understand.

The Clippers can still argue about framing and motive, but the written record is now a central part of the case. The Sonnenberg messages are not the whole report. They are the kind of small internal detail that makes the broader finding feel much less abstract.