If a nonexistent tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?

Good morning. It's Day 2 of Apple Tree Time, Apple Tree Time. Let's basketball.

Some developments from yesterday's bombshell Pablo Torre Finds Out report on apparent salary cap circumvention from the Clippers and Kawhi Leonard using a bankrupted green investment fraud pit called Aspiration:

• The NBA announced it would start an investigation.
• The Clippers released a statement calling the accusations "absurd" and highlighting Aspiration's fraudulence.
• Mark Cuban caped for Steve Ballmer.

The GMIB Discord was rippin' and this story has really captured the NBA community in the doldrums of September. The discourse is so hot that the league even leaked some info on changes to the All-Star format and it doesn't seem like anyone cares.

Let's react to reactions via a good ol' Q&A format.

After 24 hours, how bad does this look for Steve Ballmer and the Clippers?
It looks worse. Here's why. First, the two problems for the NBA on this as the PR problem and internal relations between franchise owners. We don't know how other franchise owners feel yet. (Set Mark Cuban aside. He's a minority owner but not on the Board of Governors. And he has never met a topic he wasn't willing to post about.) On the PR front, this story has received maximal attention from across the board. Pablo Torre knows how to turn a big investigative piece into a media firestorm, and has done so. He was everywhere on Wednesday. The story is so big that the NBA simply cannot deal with it quietly. It's a full-on conflagration.

Second, the Clippers had told Torre that the claims were "provably false" in their initial statement before the story broke. That created some level of doubt, as if they had a paper trail to show either it wasn't a no-show job or that the Clippers put into writing at some point that they could not be involved directly in sponsorship agreements with players. But the Clippers statement in the wake of the story – which took basically all day to release – can be summed up in two words: "Nuh uh." The best time to clearly refute Torre's story with evidence was when Torre gave them a chance to respond before publication. The second best time was the immediate aftermath. Given that this is primarily a PR problem and the immediate goal is to take the heat off of Adam Silver and defang bloodthirsty fellow NBA governors, that the Clippers didn't present anything to show the claims are "provably false" quite possibly means they don't have anything. Now, Ballmer has plenty of high-end lawyers to find something that could pass for cover as the investigation goes on. But the events of Wednesday, to me, make the Clippers look more guilty, not less.

Will Ballmer avoid punishment because other owners are afraid of the skeletons in their own closests?