The N.B.A. left no doubt. After a yearlong investigation into the Los Angeles Clippers, which concluded that the team had circumvented the league’s salary cap by secretly arranging no-show endorsement deals with at least four companies for their star Kawhi Leonard, the commissioner, Adam Silver, issued the most severe punishment in N.B.A. history. The Clippers were docked five first-round draft picks and fined thirty million dollars; its owner, Steve Ballmer, was barred from team activities for a year; its president of business operations, Gillian Zucker, was suspended without pay for a year, and the president of basketball operations, Lawrence Frank, got six months. Leonard, the player at the center of the scandal, was fined seven hundred thousand dollars, which is either a gross under-penalty or the league’s coup de grâce: it appears to have mollified the N.B.A. Players Association, likely reducing the risk of arbitration and thus potentially foreclosing the Clippers’ only very feasible avenue for appeal. (The team, which investigators described as uncoöperative, continues to deny any wrongdoing and insisted in a statement that it will challenge the ruling.) One urgent question remains: What’s with all the hammers?

They’re all over the place. The website Defector counted eighteen headlines about the league’s punishment of the Clippers that used variations of the word “hammer,” in sources that included everything from the “No Dunks” basketball podcast to the Wall Street Journal. (Defector’s own headline: “When All You Have Is a Hammer, Every Headline Looks Like a Nail.”) I spotted the word in stories in The Athletic and the Ringer, heard it on “SportsCenter,” and saw it in the title of an episode of “Pablo Torre Finds Out”—the podcast that originally exposed an apparent sham endorsement deal between Leonard and Aspiration, an environmental startup, which launched the league’s investigation. Another story in Defector upgraded the Clippers’ punishment to a “million-ton craphammer.” Hammers were swung, laid down, and otherwise deployed. Most of them were “dropped.”

As clichés go, “drop the hammer” is not the worst. It’s pithy. It’s got a pleasing staccato rhythm. It suggests authority, impact, a decisive action—even righteous violence. And it has the virtues (yes, there are virtues) of a cliché: it’s effective as shorthand; everyone knows what it means. Or do they? The more times I came across it, the more it confused me. What does it mean?

I imagine that the people saying that Silver “hammered” the Clippers wanted readers to picture Silver—a thin, bald, bespectacled lawyer—swinging a hammer and smashing the Clippers’ future. But hammers are more commonly associated with building things, not destroying them. And “dropping the hammer” is something else. The origins of the phrase are obscure: It may have something to do with a nineteenth-century drop hammer—a type of hammer that was raised and released onto an anvil. (Think of a pile driver.) Or it might have had something to do with the firing mechanism of a gun. Or it could be referring to an auctioneer’s hammer announcing a sale, or the bang of a judge’s gavel as the final verdict is rendered. The phrase arguably borrows something from all those antecedents, but it doesn’t quite derive from any one of them. It’s a metaphor that sounds vivid but turns out to have no literal reference.

Perhaps only a pedant—or a hypocrite—would fuss about that kind of imprecision. I use clichés all the time; this is the pot calling the kettle black. And who cares if “dropping the hammer” refers to some sort of cross between a gavel and a gun and a pile driver? You know a craphammer when you see one.

But seeing the word over and over again gave me an uneasy feeling I’d had many times while considering the strange case of Leonard and the Clippers. It’s a feeling of being swept along on a stream of shared assumptions and then sensing that the water is murky; things aren’t quite what they seem. The case began with the reporting by “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” which revealed a great deal (and won Torre a Pulitzer): Leonard, a wildly talented N.B.A. star who plays rarely and speaks publicly hardly at all, was paid huge amounts of money by a climate-focussed fintech company that had gone bankrupt and whose leader is now in prison for fraud. The company had a three-hundred-million-dollar deal with the Clippers to become its new stadium’s “founding partner,” and Ballmer, the league’s richest owner—and one of its most well-respected ones, too—was among the company’s investors. Further reporting revealed evidence of several other suspicious deals.

The subsequent league investigation, which was conducted by the law firm Wachtell Lipton, brought us many more facts about what happened. The firm’s report laid them out in plain and careful detail, with quotes from texts, e-mails, interviews, and contemporaneous notes. The over-all impression at the end is the same as it was a year ago, based on Torre’s first podcast on the subject: the Clippers engaged in salary-cap circumvention. And yet the report also left me with another distinct impression: how hard it is to know exactly what, in any given moment, is going on.

That was true, of course, before Torre’s revelations; if Aspiration hadn’t gone bankrupt, there might not have been the start of a public paper trail, and the Clippers might have gotten away with the whole scheme. And it remained true even as the reporting unfolded. Along the way, many trusted journalists and large portions of the public got at least part of the story wrong. Two weeks ago, an ESPN story by three respected journalists began, “The NBA has found no evidence showing LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer funneled money through team sponsors to pay Kawhi Leonard in order to circumvent the salary cap, according to three people with knowledge of discussions between the two sides in recent days.” Likewise, many people believed that Silver would avoid imposing a harsh punishment on Ballmer, or that the investigators would evade asking tough questions. Some felt that Ballmer was too smart to be involved in this sort of chicanery. Others thought that the mere fact of his extreme wealth suggested a lack of integrity. What gives the Wachtell Lipton investigation credibility is not only its careful presentation of facts but also the way the context and sources are weighed and considered. By the time the report comes to its conclusion, it’s almost impossible not to believe that the endorsement deals were “initiated, facilitated, and induced” by the Clippers, apparently in order to satisfy the demands of Leonard’s uncle, his business manager. Nothing is taken for granted. Nothing is made too grand.

Zucker told one story that investigators determined was a lie. Ballmer said that another was what they called “inaccurate (at best).” Frank took notes that described things—who said what, in what meeting—in real time. Then he gave those notes to the lawyers. The Clippers acknowledged only introducing Leonard to sponsors, and claimed that other teams did the same. The suggestion was that they’d been singled out for a common practice, as if they were no different from any other ambitious team. What the notes described was something more specific, and much more damning than that.

The danger of clichés has itself become a cliché, ever since George Orwell described the connection between the debasement of language and the impoverishment of thought in “Politics and the English Language,” eighty years ago. Like any cliché, the danger can be overplayed. Orwell was exploring the roles that euphemism, tangled syntax, and dying metaphors can play in obscuring the true intentions of a totalitarian state. The person who used “drops hammer” in a USA Today headline was talking about a team breaking a sports league’s rules by overpaying a basketball player. There’s no equivalency. But we’re living in a time of growing authoritarianism and diminishing trust. Repair will require not only a common respect for rules but a common skepticism about easy consensus, and a faith that words can mean what they say. ♦