Board man gets caught

Welcome back to our weekly pick 'em game. Once again, we’re putting five $20 gift cards up for grabs for anyone who can correctly pick a slate of five games over the long weekend. 

Five players who nail all of their picks will get a $20 gift card of their choosing sent straight to their email. Send this link to your friends, family, enemies, ex-girlfriend…we don’t care, just share the fun.

Click here to lock in your picks for this week. 

🧑‍💻LeBron James’ go-to illegal sports streaming site, StreamEast, gets taken down. The world’s most popular illegal sports streaming site was (sadly) taken offline as part of a raid in Egypt. The site had 136 million average monthly visits and 1.6 billion total visits last year. 

• This is really bad timing for football fans, who also just got hit with the news that RedZone will now have full commercial breaks this season.
  

• One day, we’ll be telling our kids about the glory days when our Sundays were full of seven hours of borderline illegal, free and commercial-less football.
  

🏈 Players spitting on each other, weather delays and ejections … what a start to the NFL season. Jalen Carter got thrown out of the game before playing a snap after he spat on Cowboys QB Dak Prescot. Jalen Hurts balled out, guys got carted off the field, and the Cowboys defence sure looked like they missed Micah Parsons (shocker).

🏒 New quote of the week: NHL vet Tyson Barrie gave possibly the most hilarious and honest answer when he was asked this week why he decided to hang up the skates and call it a career. In his own words: “It was a decision in tandem with the 32 NHL teams.”

⚾️ Kyle Schwarber can’t stop hitting home runs. The Phillies slugger became the third player in franchise history to notch a four-homer game. Unfortunately for him, exactly one third of the players who accomplished that feat died from falling into Niagara Falls blackout drunk. We hope he keeps his wits about him. 

🎾 Novak Djokovic can’t shake the Diddy party story. The Joker has made a surprisingly deep run in the U.S. Open, but people are still talking about his weird connection to Diddy — who has been in attendance at matches rooting for him over the course of his career. When asked about how he knows him, Djokovic’s unfortunate words back in 2011 were: “We met at a party that I can’t talk about”. 

• He may have won 24 Grand Slams, but the media training could still use some polishing. 

🤦‍♂️ Bill Belichick gets embarrassed in his college football debut. Bill’s UNC Tar Heels got blown out 41-7 by TCU. Ironically, coach Belichick was actually 47 years old when his now-girlfriend Jordan Hudson celebrated her 7th birthday. The universe can have a funny way of humbling and ridiculing you at the same time. 

🥊 Tennis is getting another battle of the sexes. World number one Aryna Sabalenka is set to play washed up men's tennis player Nick Kyrgios (ranked No. 651) in a match sometime in the next six months. Kyrgios joked this week that he won’t even have to try, predicting a comfortable 6-2 victory. We’ll see about that.

• Back in 1973, Billie Jean King beat another washed up men's tennis player, Bobby Riggs, in the OG “Battle of the Sexes”, a moment that was captured in a really strange movie starring Emma Stone and Steve Carrell.

Kawhi Leonard might be the quietest superstar in basketball, but his off-court finances are making a whole hell of a lot of noise. 

According to former employees of a now-bankrupt environmental startup called Aspiration, Kawhi signed a fake $28 million endorsement deal for the tree-planting company in 2022 that was designed to circumvent the NBA’s salary cap. 

The best part? Aspiration was funded by Clippers owner Steve Ballmer.

So how did this shady deal actually work?  

Allegedly…. Ballmer wired $50 million into the start-up just weeks after Leonard signed a four-year, $176 million team-friendly extension. Right after that deal, the Clippers announced a $300 million sponsorship deal with the company. 

• Staff at Aspiration even joked in internal emails about the arrangement, saying word-for-word that it was “to circumvent the cap. LOL”. 

Fast forward: Aspiration collapsed into bankruptcy this year after its co-founder pled guilty to wire fraud (checks out). Unsurprisingly, two of its three largest creditors were the Clippers and another Ballmer-owned company. 

• Meanwhile, the NBA has now launched an investigation into the Clippers that could soon lead to fines, stripped draft picks, voided contracts, and suspensions.

Why it matters: This saga serves as a reminder that even in leagues with salary caps designed to keep things fair, teams will still find creative — if not illegal — ways to lure stars with big paydays. 

• The Broncos were punished for secretly paying John Elway and Terrell Davis outside their contracts.
  

• The Devils quietly backloaded money in Ilya Kovalchuk’s 17-year, $102 million deal to circumvent the salary cap. The contract was eventually voided and the Devils had to cough up $3 million and draft picks.
  

• The Timberwolves also lost multiple first-round picks and paid a $3.5 million fine after making secret future-payment promises to Joe Smith as part of his contract. 

Takeaway: This isn’t even Kawhi’s first brush with weird contract demands. In 2019, when he was a free agent, reports surfaced that his uncle was negotiating everything from private planes to partial team ownership as part of Kawhi’s signing perks. We know the board man needs to get paid, but maybe leave the shady, backroom, mafia-deals to the professionals. 

It doesn't always take 12 legs to hit big. For @bigballergivedollars, four sneaky unders on a slate of Tuesday night MLB games was all it took to 65x his tokens. Not a bad day at the office. 

Check out the full parlay here 

🎞️ On this day in 1987, tennis legend John McEnroe was fined and suspended for two months after going on an all-time umpire tirade. At one point in the shouting match, McEnroe asked the chair umpire to do him a favour, and shove the microphone up his ass. Classic stuff, really. 

Alright, that’s enough yelling for one Friday.

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