Pablo Torre uncovered the Kawhi scandal and won a Pulitzer. He’s still searching for something more - Toronto Star

The Los Angeles Clippers-Kawhi Leonard cap circumvention case as presented on 'Pablo Torre Finds Out' has been his masterpiece. It's only part of his story. 

Pablo Torre is a curious soul and he is happy to tell you about it, and that’s the basic thesis of “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” his podcast which, among other things, drove the Kawhi Leonard salary-cap circumvention case. It was Torre who got a tip involving bankruptcy documents in California almost two years ago, and he and his staff haven’t stopped digging. The show had already won a Pulitzer for the coverage, but when the NBA hammered the Los Angeles Clippers last week Torre was vindicated beyond imagination.

And amid the plaudits, Torre is struggling with something. People kept asking him if he felt validated by the punishment. Intellectually, he knows that’s not the bar. More than ever, journalists know the truth doesn’t always lead to consequences for the powerful.

“A corporation’s outside counsel is not the approval I’m seeking,” said Torre in a phone interview. “My own standard is in the work itself, which speaks for itself, is what I always think to myself.

“But the thing that I’ve been feeling more than ever this week is why these consequences have made me feel more energized and inspired to do the next thing.”

Part of it has to be the glory, right? It’s nice to be feted, to be appreciated, to be called a beacon of journalism. But there’s something else, too.

Full disclosure: I have known Pablo for 15 years, and appeared on his podcast episode last year about Wayne Gretzky and FBI director Kash Patel. My own reporting on Leonard fit in with what he was uncovering; I heard whispers of cap circumvention the day Leonard left. At the time, it was just impossible to prove.

Torre proved it. The NBA-commissioned Wachtell report cites Torre in the first line, and deservedly so. And Steve Ballmer, the richest sports owner in America and one of the richest men in the world, was given one of the most devastating punishments in NBA history: the loss of five first-round draft picks, a $30-million (U.S.) team fine, a one-year suspension from league and team activity, and more. The New York Times reports the United States justice department has opened a criminal investigation, though the parameters are unknown. Consequences.

Pablo Torre records an episode of “Pablo Torre Finds Out” with guest speaker and American radio personality Ira Glass in September of 2025.

It’s the culmination of a short lifetime in the business. Torre put aside the dream of becoming a lawyer and joined Sports Illustrated in 2007 as a fact-checker straight out of Harvard, and became a senior writer. (His 2012 piece with David Epstein on trans athletes in sport, which does not appear to be online, remains one of the best pieces written on the subject.) Torre joined ESPN in 2012, ostensibly as a writer.

But the siren song of TV called. Torre appeared across the network and still guest hosts “Pardon The Interruption” and appears on MSNBC. From 2018 to 2020 he co-hosted a show called “Highly Questionable” with the talented Bomani Jones. It was cancelled after two years; that hurt Torre, who despaired that what he considered quality didn’t connect. He was pushed into hosting the network’s daily podcast. He wanted more.

So like many talented people, Torre left ESPN. Dan Le Batard, the great columnist and broadcaster who founded Meadowlark Media after leaving ESPN, says Torre may have gotten a little lazy doing too much TV gasbaggery, as Le Batard calls it. But he trusted Torre’s vision for “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” which may best be described as performance journalism.

“It’s the juxtaposition of everything around us crumbling so much that allows them to do the work that people still care about,” said Le Batard. “My brother (David) was an artist and was a postmodern cartoon expressionist, and Pablo is a modern journalism expressionist. Because all he’s doing is fact-based storytelling. It’s rigorous, and he’s got a very good antenna for what a high standard looks like. He’s smarter than most of the people in our business, and doing work in a lane that no one else wants to occupy because he’s doing the hardest thing the hardest way.”

“The joke is that I wanted to get away from the news cycle,” said Torre, who envisioned a magazine-like show.

“Pablo Torre Finds Out” has been a smash. The 40-year-old talks about stupid stuff thoughtfully, sometimes, but the meat is the reporting. In one series, Torre uncovered information about Bill Belichick’s time coaching North Carolina, including inflated credentials and culture problems — Belichick’s girlfriend Jordon Hudson is the only person who has threatened to sue the show — and UNC football general manager Michael Lombardi resigned the day after the Leonard verdict last week amid a school investigation into culture issues in the program. An investigation into Mark Walter, whose alleged Ponzi ownership of the Los Angeles Dodgers is its own scandal, dropped Friday.

Pablo Torre chats with his staff at this office in September 2025 in New York, N.Y. 

Torre has a nine-person staff, and including him four have reporting duties, but his pace has been incredible. He and his wife stopped at one child, a six-year-old daughter named Violet, partly because of the demands of the job.

“I think he might call me a nag on that front because I don’t want him to short circuit for his family life, for his mental health,” says Le Batard. “I mean, he’s maniacal and he’s insatiable, and that’s at least in part because he’s found exactly the thing that he wants. It is designed by him ... artists allow their art to speak for them to the world. That’s what this is, if that doesn’t sound a bit too highfalutin for a podcast.”

The 14-episode Leonard story has been Torre’s masterpiece. There’s more to the story, he says: the NBA’s independent investigation found two more companies with Leonard side deals, and the report only extends through 2022.

But so little of the NBA reporting sphere sided with Torre, or followed his reporting. The Clippers clearly pushed back hard behind the scenes, and ESPN in particular either didn’t try to match it or delivered reporting that was technically accurate but contextually wrong. Some at the company appear to be questioning the firewall between rights fees and journalism.

“It was like watching Don Quixote and watching people cheer for the windmill,” says Le Batard. “I legitimately wondered if Pablo had done all the same work for a mainstream media outlet, whether people would have been surprised by the punishment. Because if you listen to the episodes, it’s kind of inarguable. There wasn’t a lot of mystery here. There was just him combing through dense subject matter that not even journalists wanted to listen to. Never mind the idea that he had a story to himself for a year. When did that ever happen? Usually when you have any scandal in media that is one of the biggest scandals that we’ve seen in sports, what happens next is the entirety of the media descends on that story. They don’t just give the corner to one guy.”

It was bizarre. In the bigger picture, elite impunity and corruption is rampant to a mind-boggling degree in the United States at the moment, and honest journalism is under attack across the world with right-wingers and authoritarians leading the charge. And in a fractured and poisoned information environment, so little honest reporting lands with people the way it used to. Torre’s Leonard series felt like the old journalism world. Torre emphasizes he is not exactly reporting in Gaza or Ukraine, but that said Ballmer is as rich — and therefore powerful — as almost anybody on Earth. And that’s why Torre needed the consequences in the Clippers case. That’s what he was struggling with.

So little of the NBA reporting sphere sided with Pablo Torre, or followed his reporting, during the Clippers scandal.

“In sports, to give people just the feeling back of, wait a minute, maybe this story will do something ... it is meaningful,” says Torre. “That is something that I have felt viscerally, and I think about it all the time. I should not want this quote unquote vindication, but this quote unquote vindication, this ruling, this punishment, this consequence, is the thing that also is what is keeping me going, and it’s because I also feel that. I feel it more than I intellectually like to admit.

“We are living in a desert where people feel like this sort of stuff doesn’t work anymore. But it’s the same sh-t it’s always been. It’s documents, it’s human sources, it’s fact checking, it’s months of investigation. It is trying to make sure that you get it right using every available creative thought process that you can come up with, and that’s always been what this job is. And so for me, I think it’s a validation of what all of us were taught. Like, it still works. It still works.

“I’m not saying we’re always going to be right. I am saying that the reason we haven’t been sued by a guy who has the infinite money to sue everyone is in part because of the ancient art of giving up weekends with your family to make another phone call. Like, that is the hack ... and when there are real world consequences being imposed in a part of our culture that people still really care about, that might have some sort of implication or message for the part of culture that people don’t care about, meaning real sh-t like politics or the economy or science or religion or race or anything else.

“I started at Sports Illustrated, which is a zombie now. Got hired by ESPN The Magazine, which no longer exists. Pivoted to doing cable television, which is hollowed out every day, and realized that I could smell the exhaust pipes on the town cars and hear the echoes of the squeaking drink cart wheels that the golden age of journalism enabled, that the old age of media enabled. And to feel like you’re building something that can have both — that can work financially, but also holding to some account the guy with apparently 174 billion dollars because he cares about sports the way that people who don’t care about quote unquote serious things care about sports. It just feels like we’re onto something, and it’s so new still.”

Sources say the latest wrinkle shouldn’t preclude Leonard from becoming a Raptor before training camp begins in about two weeks.