Fair punishments for the Clippers, ranked

There's another alleged cap circumvention sponsorship contract for Kawhi Leonard through the Clippers, and the league is reportedly working on a final verdict. What should they do?

Good morning. I'm back. My website theme was somehow broken in my absence. LeBron James is somehow still a Philadelphia 76er. Let's basketball.

Pablo Torre has done it again. On Thursday he revealed another secret sponsorship deal the Clippers allegedly arranged for Kawhi Leonard, this one with Daktronics, the industry leader in scoreboard manufacturing.

The upshot is that according to Torre's sources, Daktronics – an old-school company that had never so much as done any consumer marketing – cut a sponsorship deal with Kawhi Leonard while in the worst financial shape in company history around the same time as building the massive, innovative scoreboard for Steve Ballmer's Intuit Dome. Kawhi and Daktronics never acknowledged each other publicly, making this another apparent no-show endorsement deal.

From Pablo's newsletter summary of his own reporting:

One of the high-level sources familiar with the relationship between the Clippers and Daktronics, who was under contract for the Clippers’ Intuit Dome project for years, goes on tape with us to say, “It was 1,000% a way to circumvent the salary cap.” The source adds: “People at Daktronics, people within the Clippers’ organization themselves, had told me about this multimillion-dollar deal with Kawhi and Daktronics — they’re not a company that you would see a celebrity endorser for — that it wasn’t coming out of their end, that the Clippers were technically kind of funding it, and that it was funneling money from the Clippers through Daktronics back to Kawhi.”

Even worse: a crisis communications firm engaged by Daktronics responded to questions from Pablo and partner Hunterbrook Media by ... basically confirming that there had been a sponsorship between Daktronics and Kawhi at some point, and basically lying about prior work that firm had done for Ballmer.

What a mess!

The smoke is billowing out of this whole situation, and the NBA and Clippers are going to have an increasingly difficult time asserting that this is all circumstantial when a project manager or consultant for the Intuit Dome project is out here telling reporters on the record (albeit anonymously) that there was a financial pipeline from the Clippers to Kawhi that ran through Daktronics.

So what now? Assuming the NBA's lawyers discovered all this through their investigation, what should the league do to the Clippers?

Here's my take on the most fair punishments, ranked in reverse order. Combinations of these punishments are welcome!