Kawhi Leonard is a Raptor again. Are we sure that's good thing?

More than two months after it was initially agreed to, the blockbuster trade sending Kawhi Leonard from the Los Angeles Clippers back to the Toronto Raptors was finally completed yesterday. In exchange for the man who led them to their only championship in 2019 before bolting to L.A. after just one season in Toronto, the Raptors parted with all-star forward Brandon Ingram, guard Gradey Dick, two unprotected first-round draft picks, a first-round pick swap and a pair of second-rounders.

The reason for the holdup, of course, was the NBA's investigation into a salary-cap circumvention scheme involving Leonard and the Clippers that was first revealed on sports journalist Pablo Torre's podcast in September 2025. Since then, Torre and his team have continued to uncover evidence that the Clippers, who signed Leonard to a sub-maximum contract extension in 2024, funnelled money to him via sponsorship deals with team-aligned companies that required him to do no work whatsoever and were not even made public. Those included a $28-million US deal with Aspiration, a dodgy "sustainability" services outfit whose co-founder, Joe Sanberg, was later sentenced to 14 years in U.S. federal prison after pleading guilty to defrauding investors.

Following an almost year-long investigation conducted by the white-shoe law firm Wachtell Lipton, the NBA dropped the largest punishment in league history on the Clippers earlier this month, fining the team $30M and stripping them of five first-round draft picks. In addition, Clippers president of business operations Gillian Zucker and president of basketball ops Lawrence Frank both received lengthy suspensions without pay. And, perhaps most strikingly, owner Steve Ballmer — the former CEO of Microsoft