Dan Le Batard lights up NBA media for disconnect on Clippers story: ‘Nobody listened to the episodes’
The story of the salary cap circumvention plot by the Los Angeles Clippers seemed to play out in the shadows of NBA media over the past year, as the league investigation marched on but major outlets largely ignored the scandal.
This disconnect led many prominent people to question Pablo Torre and his reporting on the Clippers’ efforts. If a podcaster was the only one poking around, some seemed to think, was there really anything there?
Now that the NBA has handed down a historic penalty and settled with the players’ union, Torre is not only celebrating the breakthrough but openly questioning why there was so little additional reporting beyond his own.
Torre’s boss, Dan Le Batard, in an appearance on the Nothing Personal podcast this week, gave his perspective on why reporters and commentators alike did not treat the Clippers story as the momentous scandal that it was. The answer, to Le Batard is simple: They weren’t actually consuming Torre’s reporting.
“What I have since learned in just watching some of the coverage of this after it has happened is nobody listened to the episodes,” Le Batard explained.
“You had the people who were listening to Pablo Torre Finds Out, and they were like, ‘This is locked down, why is no one else talking about this? How is this egregious of a cheating thing not being covered more correctly anywhere else?’ And it’s confusing, right? Because you’re used to, if there’s a scandal, the media, all of it, descends. And now stories start breaking everywhere.
“But what I learned in watching the analysis afterward is even people at the highest points of our food chain in sports journalism couldn’t even be bothered to listen to Pablo’s episodes. Not 14 of them, not one of them. Like, they couldn’t be bothered to get themselves informed on subject matter that was this dense. And I’ve just not ever seen it before, where the distance between the top of the people in sports journalism and what you guys were doing was so large that you guys were telling a story that these people couldn’t even be bothered to try to understand by listening to the episodes.”
At the outset of the NBA’s investigation and then again after it announced the punishment, the broader NBA media discussed the story. Along the way, however, few of Torre’s revelations became national news.
Sleuths online have noted that many prominent NBA commentators have all shared similar stories in the aftermath of the NBA’s ruling, revealing how desperately the Clippers clung to their claims of innocence. An ESPN story last month appeared to suggest Clippers owner Steve Ballmer might evade punishment.
The ammunition to combat these tales was there in Torre’s extensive reporting. But Le Batard, who owns Meadowlark Media and oversees PTFO, believes many simply ignored the work Torre put out. The work, Le Batard said, spoke for itself.
“You guys had it locked down. If you listen to those 14 episodes, it is inescapable,” he said.
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