A lot of people owe Pablo Torre an apology

Pablo Torre was accused of trying to ruin people’s lives. Might be time for some apologies.

For nearly a year, Torre kept reporting on Kawhi Leonard, the Clippers, Steve Ballmer and the possibility that money outside Leonard’s NBA contract was being used to circumvent the salary cap.

He didn’t make the story up. He didn’t drop one bombshell, collect the clicks and disappear. He kept reporting. And people kept coming after him.

Things really heated up last month, when ESPN reported that the NBA had found no evidence showing Ballmer funneled money through team sponsors to Leonard as a means of circumventing the salary cap.

Former NBA guard Ty Lawson was among those who immediately went after Torre.

“So does Pablo Torre get any fine, backlash, sued, or fired for trying to ruin people’s reputation/life or Pablo can just say oops my bad and sweep it under the rug,” Lawson wrote on X.

Lawson was hardly alone. Torre’s replies and mentions filled with people treating ESPN’s report as proof that his reporting had been discredited. There was just one problem. The NBA investigation wasn’t finished.

In fact, the league responded to ESPN’s report that very day, saying the story contained “numerous and significant inaccuracies” and promising that the actual results would become clear when the investigation concluded.

Well, now it has, and the results aren’t particularly kind to the people who spent the past year dismissing Torre.

The NBA found what it called “a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations” by the Clippers involving Leonard and salary-cap circumvention.

The penalties are massive. The Clippers lost five first-round draft picks. Ballmer was fined $30 million. Ballmer and multiple Clippers executives were suspended. Leonard was fined $700,000. His uncle and former business representative, Dennis Robertson, was banned from NBA business dealings.

Does every detail of the NBA’s investigation validate every word ever reported about the situation? Of course not. That’s not how journalism works.

But neither does journalism work the way Torre’s critics seemed to think it did on Aug. 17. You don’t declare an investigative reporter a fraud because another outlet publishes a sourced report that appears to contradict him.

You certainly don’t start talking about lawsuits and ruining people’s lives before the investigation that reporter helped trigger has even been completed. Torre found something. Then he kept digging.

His reporting led to questions that were substantial enough for the NBA to spend a year investigating them, and the league ultimately determined that serious rules violations occurred.

There will undoubtedly be more arguments about exactly who knew what, who arranged what and how every dollar moved. Fine. That’s what reporting is for.

But after everything that was said about Pablo Torre over the past year, one thing seems pretty clear: A whole lot of people owe the guy an apology.