.@​pablotorre explains how even though Clippers owner Steve Ballmer is threatening litigation against the NBA, the league's boxed him in, with very few good options but to accept the punishment and move on: "This was the biggest punishment for an owner in the history of, I think, American professional sports. And the NBA took 5 first-round picks, which is the most you could imagine. They took $30M, which is a rounding error for Ballmer, of course. They made him pay the $50M legal fee to the NBA's outside counsel, which is also a rounding error, but still pretty annoying, I would imagine." "But the real thing that I thought was meaningful was, they banned Steve Ballmer from his own building, for a year. He loves basketball, he sits courtside, he literally measured the toilets at the Intuit Dome when he was designing the whole building. He was a micromanager who knew everything about every piece of the building. And they banned him from being inside his own building, which he funded for $2B privately. They also banned his president of business for a year, and they banned his GM for 6 months..." "Ballmer, now, is rattling his saber. Because he is the former CEO of Microsoft who, when presented with antitrust findings by the federal government, also fought. This is unsurprising if you know the trajectory of his life." "What he has threatened is litigation. What he has not been able to pursue is arbitration. Which is interesting. Because in sports court, you have an arbitrator, but that is an arrangement with the player — Kawhi Leonard — and his union, as well as the league." "And when Kawhi Leonard got a slap on the wrist — only a $700,000 fine, no suspension, no voiding of the contract, no nothing — he agreed to a settlement that was quite favorable. And the question was,