The NBA spent the offseason investigating why Aspiration, a now-bankrupt "green banking" startup, agreed to pay Kawhi Leonard $28 million to do essentially nothing, and on Tuesday commissioner Adam Silver answered his own question with a gavel. The league stripped the Clippers of a future first-round pick and fined owner Steve Ballmer $10 million personally, the largest fine ever levied against an individual owner, for what investigators concluded was a side deal engineered to route money to Leonard outside his actual contract. Mark Cuban, who spent a decade getting fined by this same office for far smaller sins, posted his approval before the ink dried. Ballmer, worth $170 billion, is not going to miss the check.

Here is the number that actually stings: that $10 million fine is 0.006 percent of Ballmer's net worth, roughly what a Microsoft alum spends on a nice boat slip. The real punishment is the pick, because in a hard-capped league the draft is the only place a $170 billion owner cannot simply outspend the problem. The Clippers built a supposed title window around a $28 million accounting trick, and the league just repossessed a piece of their future to make the point. Kawhi Leonard, for the record, remains on the roster, remains healthy for about four games a season, and remains the single most expensive mystery in professional sports.