Many have been waiting to see how the NBA will handle the scandal between Kawhi Leonard, Aspiration, and the Los Angeles Clippers. Many are anticipating that the league will drop the hammer on them while also wondering how it came to this. Former NBA player Rashad McCants believes that this problem started way before that.
Rashad McCants Believes Kawhi Leonard Issue Started Back in 2011
McCants, who played in the NBA from 2005 to 2009, recently started a career in sports journalism. In his very first article for his online publication “RAW,” McCants argues that the ongoing scandal involving the Clippers, Leonard, and Aspiration began over a decade and a half before they were first exposed.
“To be clear: if the Clippers and Ballmer are ultimately cleared of wrongdoing, this will still expose a deeper issue, the financial architecture of the modern NBA incentivizes creative compensation structures at the top while compressing mobility at the middle. The investigation’s outcome matters. But the system it reveals matters more. And that system didn’t start with Aspiration. It started in 2011.”
Expanding my talents a bit!!! I’m now a Journalist/Columnist
Read and react https://t.co/hoW8WfQHRd — Dr. Rashad McCants Ph.D Psy.D (@SoundbiteKing) March 16, 2026
From there, McCants delved into how the NBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement from 2011 led to this, discussing how the NBA system strongly supports star players while those who are not considered such suffer as a result, which included himself.
McCants lays out both how the system got changed and how it affected him as a player. Even though he last played in the NBA in 2009 with the Sacramento Kings, McCants attempted to return to the league with the Dallas Mavericks and Los Angeles Lakers from 2010 to 2012.
But, as he explains it, his status as technically a veteran got in the way because of how much giving him another shot would cost the owners (even though he wouldn’t have cost that much, strictly speaking). He wasn’t the only casualty, and this exact issue has only gotten worse.
People can scoff at McCants here, but he’s not wrong about the NBA being a star-driven league and how lopsided the contracts have become over the years makes it harder for non-star players to survive, despite still having enough talent to stick around.
It’s why teams would rather take their chances by giving a role to a rookie than sign a proven veteran still reasonably in his prime, because the latter option would be more expensive. How much they play star players, by contrast, only makes it worse.
Leonard’s scandal proves what owners will do to bend those rules. There’s been strong enough evidence to conclude that the Clippers cheated the system to pay Leonard above and beyond what he was technically worth. Because of the leverage stars get, the real question people should be asking is: Were the Clippers the only team doing this, or the one team dumb enough to get caught?
