We have seen Angry Adam Silver before.“The views expressed by Mr. Sterling are deeply offensive, and harmful,” Silver said on April 29, 2014. “That they came from an NBA owner only heightens the damage, and my personal outrage.”That day, if you remember, Silver — nearly three months into his tenure as NBA commissioner — banned Donald Sterling, then the Los Angeles Clippers’ longtime governor, from the league for life, and fined him $2.5 million, the maximum amount allowed by the NBA’s constitution at the time, after the disclosure of an audio tape in which Sterling made numerous racist comments about Black people. (Even Magic Johnson got caught up in Sterling’s verbal diarrhea.) Silver also pushed the league’s owners to kick Sterling out by forcing him to sell the Clippers.Last week in New York, we did not see Angry Adam Silver.In discussing the Clippers and Kawhi Leonard and Steve Ballmer and Dennis Robertson and Pablo Torre following the NBA’s Board of Governors meeting Sept. 10, Silver looked like someone trying very hard to get out of a cocktail party conversation with an eminently uninteresting guest.“I’d frankly never heard of the company Aspiration before,” Silver told reporters after the BOG meeting ended, referring to the company whose, let’s say, unusual arrangement with Leonard, is at the center of this case. “And I’d never heard a whiff of anything around an endorsement deal with Kawhi, or anything around engagement with the Los Angeles Clippers. So it was all new to me.”Silver has walked that back some in the interim. But as the league’s investigation into the Clippers and Leonard begins, it would be wise of him to keep his cudgel and his outrage sharp.We don’t yet have the answer to the Clippers’ version of the question that, ultimately, killed Richard Nixon’s presidency, asked by Senator Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) in June 1973 during the Watergate hearings: “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”We don’t know how much the Clippers explicitly knew about Leonard’s $28 million deal with Aspiration — with another $20 million in company stock — which not only paid Leonard more than other celebrity endorsers for the company, like Leonardo DiCaprio; it paid Leonard more annually than he got from his shoe deal with New Balance. We don’t know if the Clippers were merely working with one of their team’s corporate partners to enhance the value of Aspiration’s brand, or if they were partners in a circumvention scheme the likes of which the NBA has never seen.In this, former Mavericks governor Mark Cuban, who’s been Tweeting up a storm of late defending Ballmer, has a point: no one’s proved anything.But Torre, and his “Pablo Torre Finds Out” podcast, are revealing, week after week, a lot of smoke. An awful lot of smoke. And it’s important that Silver truly understands what’s at stake as he and his league dash to the scene.Most people around the league genuinely like Ballmer, and respect the work and resources he’s put both into league affairs, as chair of the Board’s audit committee, and in improving the Clippers’ brand since buying the team for $2 billion from Sterling’s wife, Shelley, in 2014. There’s a reason Silver went the “let’s let due process take its course” route after the BOG meeting: a lot of governors feel the same way.But the initial impression many have of what’s been detailed so far in Torre’s podcasts, along with subsequent reporting by other outlets, including The Athletic, is not a charitable one for Ballmer or his organization. Nor will a slap on the wrist suffice if the league indeed finds definitive evidence of cap circumvention.