Clippers Fined $250,000 for Offering DeAndre Jordan Unauthorized Endorsements The NBA announced on Tuesday that the Los Angeles Clipperswere fined $250,000 for offering center DeAndre Jordanunauthorized business opportunities, per Chris Mannixof Sports Illustrated. Brad Turner of the Los Angeles Times reported that the team offered Jordan a Lexus endorsement deal worth $200,000 a year, triggering the fine from the league. Mark Medina of the L.A. Daily News confirmed the report. Liz Mullen of Sports Business Journal posted the league's statement onher Twitter account: The violation involved a presentation made by the Clippers to free agent DeAndre Jordan on July 2 that improperly included a potential third-party endorsement opportunity for the player. While the NBA's investigation ultimately concluded that the presentation of this opportunity had no impact on Jordan's decision to re-sign with the Clippers, the team's conduct nevertheless violated the league's anti-circumvention rules. The NBA's anti-circumvention rules prohibit teams from, among other things, providing or arranging for others to provide any form of compensation to a player unless such compensation is included in a player contract or otherwise expressly permitted under the CBA. It's been a wild summer for Jordan and the Clippers. Jordan had a verbal agreement in place with the Dallas Mavericks, but he ultimately backed away to sign a four-year, $88 million deal to return to the Clippers. ............. <--------(Kinda how it went down)
A) he can't get his own endorsement deals? (Especially ones that small) B) Mark Cuban has just as many connections. So if this was part of the clippers pitch, that's just sad. C) I love that the fine is more than the entire value of the endorsement.
I love seeing the Clippers screwing up as much as the next guy, but this sounds like they just poorly executed their pitch and got fined on a technicality. Hopefully we were smart enough to present our pitches differently, because this sounds a lot like what we were doing with TWC in our FA pitches.
The Lakers never offer specific endorsements or contracts in those negotiations. What we do is tell potential signees the different endorsement opportunities they have with our brand; our sponsors, popular brands we connect with, etc. What the Clippers did was go get a specific deal from a company and offer it to Jordan. Not only was it a crappy deal, but it was illegal. You cannot offer an actual endorsement, you can only present opportunities in the market. edit- to elaborate: offering an endorsement contract during negotiations is in effect bypassing the cap limits set on salary. That 200,000 dollars wouldn't have counted against the cap, but would have come from the Clippers to DeAndre by way of a third party. That's illegal. It's the same principle as taking money under the table.
There's a quote there - about how the Clippers conducted themselves with integrity...but if you have integrity you don't barricade the doors, set up security, and isolate your "client" from other suitors. F the Clippers.
Simmons said that behind the scenes the Clippers are just as much a mess as when they were owned by Sterling. The only difference is that Sterling was a bad person and Ballmer is not.
Apparently no one wants a story about Ballmer being a bumbling, inexperienced, and frankly dumb owner. No one wants a story about Doc Rivers being handed the keys to the franchise and failing. That's not a good story. A good story right now is how we're not making the playoffs and will only win 26 games.
