Daktronics is a household name in the sport of swimming, but most Americans have never heard of the company that produces scoring, timing, and videoboard equipment.
That is until the company was revealed this week as a central figure in the Kawhi Leonard controversy.
Leonard, an NBA superstar, is at the center of a controversy alleging that he was given bogus sponsorship agreements as part of a plan by his team the Los Angeles Clippers to circumvent the NBA’s salary cap. That cap limits the amount of money each team can spend on players, which is designed to create parity among the league’s 30 teams.
Investigative sports journalist Pablo Torre has been leading the charge on breaking most of the news on this story, and his latest break revealed a familiar name for swimmers and swimming fans.
BREAKING: Kawhi Leonard had a hidden, multimillion-dollar “sponsorship” with Clippers’ scoreboard-maker, sources tell @PabloTorre.
“It was 1,000% a way to circumvent the salary cap,” insider says.
In our investigation, Daktronics‘ Ballmer-linked crisis firm raises NBA probe ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/LU1AeBAF44
— Pablo Torre Finds Out (@pablofindsout) August 7, 2026
Yes, the same Daktronics that might make your pool’s starting and timing equipment is the aforementioned “obscure” company that has emerged as a central figure in the scandal.
Torre’s sources allege that Leonard had a previously-undisclosed endorsement deal with Daktronics, a publicly traded company. Daktronics also had a deal to produce and install the massive ‘halo board’ at the Intuit Dome, the Clippres’ new $2 billion arena that opened in 2024.
That halo board had a reported cost of $100 million.
This is in addition to a previous deal Torre reported with a failed environmental startup called Aspiration. Torre alleges that these deals were an attempt to circumvent the league’s salary cap by funneling money from the team to Leonard without it counting as “salary.”
Torre’s sources say that the deal was worth “millions of dollars.”
The NBA has been investigating the case for 11 months.
Torre points out that Daktronics does not typically use celebrities for publicity, and one of his sources says that the company by principle didn’t use celebrity endorsements because it is a business-to-business product.
At one point in the piece, Daktronics was referred to as an “obscure” company, which might be true in the mainstream, but wouldn’t feel like a familiar description to swimming people.
Daktronics‘ trades on the tech-heavy NASDAQ and has a $1 billion market cap. The company reported $756.6 million in sales in 2025. The company’s stock was down 0.85% on Friday, with the news breaking just before the opening bell on Wall Street.
The company does not break its revenue down by sport, but does report about $170 million in revenue per year in the “high school park and recreation” category.
Daktronics has been the center of several timing scandals in swimming – including a 2019 CCSA Championships timing error forcing the reswim of four heats, and the infamous 2018 ISCA timing issues that required adjustments to several National Age Group Records.
