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| “Duh, which way did he go? Which way did he go? …” |
RIP Lob City. I’ll miss the Clippers. For Warriors fans, for several years running, Kill The Clippers Night has been one of those days on the calendar to circle, to look forward to, and ultimately to cherish. The NBA season can be general drudgery, of course, and teams often have to dig deep to find some motivation over the course of an 82-game season. But the Warriors haven’t lacked for any motivation when it came time to play the Clippers, because they HATED the Clippers.
If the Warriors decide they want to kill you, they’re going to kill you, and the Warriors loved to kill the Clippers, beating them 12 straight times and putting some humiliating beatdowns on them along the way. Last season, it reached its zenith, as Golden State just toyed with the Clippers. They made it a point to beat the Clippers by 50 in a preseason game. They beat them by nearly 50 during the season as well, and also put up a 50-point quarter against the Clips that was statistically near-perfect, posting a 200.00 offensive rating. The Clips finally broke the streak earlier this season, beating the Dubs in December in a game where Lou Williams scored 50 points and the Warriors attempted to play a game without an actual backcourt – Curry was hurt, and Klay Thompson was “resting,” a sure sign that the novelty of grinding the Clippers into dust had worn off. The Warriors no longer care about the Clippers. The Clips have been rendered just another drudge game to slog through.
The acrimony originally boiled over during a 2014 playoff series, when the two teams got into a fight during a prayer chapel session and then later had to hastily erect a unified front and threaten to walk off the court if the NBA didn’t do anything about Clippers owner Donald Sterling. But the animosity had already been brewing, as the ascending Dubs had grown tired of the Clippers’ act:
The Clippers went on to win that contentious 2014 playoff series, only to lose to OKC in the next round – thanks, in part, to one of the worst chokes in NBA history. Seriously, that one defied all logic and sense. But as if to show that blowing a 7-point lead in the final minute of a playoff game wasn’t a fluke, the Clippers pulled off an ever greater choke in 2015 as they blew a 3-1 lead in the Western semifinal, including gagging away a 19-point lead in Game 6 to the Houston Rockets – a Rockets team with James Harden on the bench, no less. Thus was born one of the more peculiar narratives imaginable, one in which a team which won more games, over a 6-year period, than just about any other team still somehow didn’t know how to win.
The Lob City Clippers have always been something of a paradox, a winning team that doesn’t know how to win, a team playing an exciting style that still wasn’t any fun to watch because everyone involved gave off the vibe that they hated each other. They seemed, in hindsight, as if they were artificially assembled to fill a void in the Los Angeles market left by the Lakers descending into chaos and irrelevance. Bring in Doc Rivers, who had a championship pedigree, to coach and run the show; have a lucky ping pong ball bounce their way in the lottery and bring a star talent, Blake Griffin, into the L.A. market; conveniently acquire an élite caliber point guard, Chris Paul, from the New Orleans
“You need luck in the West. Look at Golden State. They didn’t have to play us or the Spurs.”
– Doc Rivers, 2015
And even with all of the winning of late, no one in L.A. really cared about the Clippers, or has ever really cared about the Clippers, who probably shouldn’t have ever been there in the first place, but for years the NBA was perfectly happy letting weirdo owners do weirdo things, so allowing some eccentric Santa Monica slum lord to relocate from San Diego, and then operate, a secondary franchise in the glitzy L.A. market was ultimately better than having that franchise go out of business. Prior to the rise of Lob City, being exiled to the Clippers was just about the worst thing that could happen to your NBA career. (Either that, or being exiled to the Warriors, interestingly enough.) Any Clipper success just sort of felt unclean, given the smarmie, sleazy guy who was in charge of the operation.
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| Actual sworn testimony from Donald Sterling |
But hey, it’s Lob City! It’s a new era for the Clippers, right? Let’s get excited! Steve Ballmer certainly got excited enough to pay $2,000,000,000 for the franchise (which gets other NBA owners excited, of course, since that gross overpay artificially inflates the value of everyone else’s franchise). And the Clippers have been, over the course of the past six years, incredibly successful by their meager historical standards. But they’ve also never delivered, in the end, be it through choking horribly in the 2014 and 2015 playoffs to seeming just out-and-out cursed the past couple of years: the Clips lost Blake and CP3 to season ending injuries in the same game in a 2016 playoff loss to the Portland Trail Blazers, and then Blake hurt his foot in a playoff game against the Jazz in 2017, and out the door they went once more. It was really kind of sad and you could almost feel sorry for them.
Almost, but not quite, because during this run of good play from L.A., the Clippers been incredibly unlovable. The have been a lippy, chippy, chirpy, mouthy bunch who annoy basically everybody, including one-another. The chief perpetrator was future Hall of Fame point guard/locker room lawyer/NBA players union president Chris Paul, who used that last position to skillfully negotiate a CBA for the players which would enable him the largest contract possible, and then, to his credit, skillfully negotiated his exit from the Clippers this past summer: given the chance to opt out of his contract and become a free agent, Paul instead told GM Roc Divers (Doc Rivers’ alter ego, as coined by the fabulous Dunc’d On NBA podcast) that he would opt in for his final season, but only if the Clippers traded him to the Rockets, who conveniently had a trade all lined up for CP3. (Tampering? In the NBA? Really?) Paul got his wish and, almost immediately, the Rockets have taken over the mantle as the most annoying team in the NBA, what with pairing CP3’s whine-and-dime routine with the human flopping fish that is James Harden, who somehow continues to fool NBA officials into awarding him 18 free throws a game.
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| James Harden on every drive to the basket |
And I kid about the Rockets, but the fact is that CP3’s Rockets have become what CP3’s Clippers never were, which is a viable threat to the behemoth that is the Golden State Warriors, despite having possessed as good a first four – CP3, Blake, DJ, and deadeye marksman JJ Redick – as anyone in the league. There are over 300,000,000 people in this country, yet somehow the Clippers couldn’t find one of them to play on the wing. The bench was always a perpetual tire fire, thanks to GM Roc Divers’ strange approach to team-building. Apart from the one game out of three where Jamal Crawford would get hot – usually too hot, as he would then not know when to stop shooting and shoot his team into oblivion – the Clippers bench units could scarcely get the ball inbounds, much less string two passes together, much less perform competently long enough to let the starters catch their breaths.
Lob City really died when CP3 left town – an act which was somewhat mutual, as he was tired of losing and everyone there was tired of him. He did, however, do the Clippers a favor, as the Houston trade allowed the Clips to at least get something in return, as opposed to having him walk. The summer of 2017 looked to be a bad time for the Clippers, as both Paul and Griffin could walk in free agency. So the Clippers went all-in on Blake Griffin, offering him a 5-year, $171 million contract. Blake was, and arguably still is, a star, after all. He was a high-flyer whose spectacular dunks crystalized the myth of Lob City. He was the #1 overall pick who had spent his whole career in L.A., had brought legitimacy to what was a joke of a franchise.
And pretty much from the moment they signed Blake to that new contract this summer, the Clippers brass were rummaging through the desk drawer, looking for the receipts. Blake’s had a string of injuries in his career – some of them fluky, to be sure, but health is still a skill. His game is much more ground bound now, and to his credit, he’s evolved into a guy who can step out and shoot a three, can work at the top of the key as a passer and a playmaker. But at this point, he has the game of a 33-year-old vet in a 28-year-old body, and any of the skill work you’d want him to do down on the low block was made impossible because Jordan is there clogging up space. Was it really a good idea to give him $171 million?
But this is what happens with free agency in the NBA and elsewhere. You wind up paying big dollars for past results to a player who is, if you’re lucky, still in his prime but, what’s more likely, is past his physical peak and actually on the downside of his career. Coming to realize this has led to an entire rethinking of the free agent landscape across all sports. It’s been particularly stark this year in baseball, for example, where scores and scores of serviceable free agents have yet to sign contracts with the start of spring training just around the corner. MLBPA brass want to make the claim that there is some collusion, on the part of ownership, to keep the prices down and market repressed, and while I wouldn’t put it past them, you can’t argue with the fact that so many of the enormous, long-term deals that players have signed in baseball have turned out to be albatrosses. If you knew nothing at all about baseball, and you went with me to a
Of course the Clippers didn’t want to pay $171 million for a 28-year-old high flyer becoming more ground bound every day, but they also need stars. It’s Los Angeles, after all. There are 10 professional sports franchises in L.A. now, there are also two of the most prestigious collegiate athletic programs in the country. You have to clamor to be relevant. Hell, the Clippers have still been playing second fiddle, in the consciousness of the typical Angelino, to a pathetic Lakers organization that has devolved into soap opera and sideshow. One of their stars walked away from them this summer, and the Clippers desperately needed to keep the other in order to stay relevant. And remember, Ballmer wants to build them a new arena, as well. The Clippers aren’t even the second tenant at the Staples Center. They have less priority than the Kings, much less the Lakers – and with good reason, because the Kings have actually won something. You need stars in L.A. to be relevant, and Blake Griffin is certainly that. So the Clippers decided to hold their noses and do it, offering up a maximal contract to Griffin and putting forth the most preposterous free agent sales pitch of all time in the process.
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| Are you serious? |
And here we are, soon after the Clippers raised Blake’s jersey to the banners in a mock number retirement ceremony, declaring him “Clipper for Life” and doing all but promising to build a statue of him outside Pie In The Sky Arena one day, and Blake Griffin is now a Detroit Piston – traded for, basically, a bunch of stuff. This should be a lesson to everyone out there who is still dumb enough to buy into the league-driven notion in sports that players should somehow be loyal to the franchise that drafted them. There sure as hell wasn’t any loyalty in L.A. towards Blake Griffin, now was there?
And see, that narrative pisses me off. Anyone – literally anyone – who still has a problem with the fact that Kevin Durant went to the Warriors puts forth an argument that is dumb. If you put forth an argument that he shouldn’t have done that, your argument is dumb as hell. Plain and simple. Same goes for LeBron taking his talents to South Beach – sure, he went about it in an amateurish way that was tone-deaf and demeaning, but KD and LeBron had earned the right to make those decisions. This is business, plain and simple. “It’s not personal, it’s just business,” as Abe Vigoda says to Al Pacino at the end of The Godfather. If you support the right of players to have that self-determination, then you don't get to bitch if and when one of them makes a choice that you don't like.
I applaud any and all athletes who want to take agency over what are very short professional careers and try to find the best situation for themselves, regardless of the reason. I may think their reasoning is nuts – I thought Kyrie Irving was nuts at the time for wanting out of Cleveland, but he seems to have been proven right – but I applaud them in principle. Sometimes it works out in my team’s favor, like it did with Kevin Durant and the Warriors. Sometimes, it doesn’t: I still remember watching the Seattle Mariners lose three future Hall of Famers in three successive years, as Randy Johnson was traded, and then Ken Griffey Jr. wanted out, and then Alex Rodriguez signed a $252 million contract with the Rangers. Of course it sucked, but you know what? That’s business. That’s life. You go on, and you figure out what to do next.
And “Clipper for life” Blake Griffin knew it was business as well, which is why he leveraged a 5-year, near-max contract out of the Clippers by taking free agent meetings with the Phoenix Suns and others. He was trying to get himself in the best situation possible. He wanted a 5-year max, or close to it – he actually took a slight haircut in the final deal – but then the Clippers used some leverage as well. Blake is an L.A. guy, a guy vested in the entertainment business and, actually, a pretty decent stand-up comedian. He wanted to be in L.A. and the Clippers wanted him in L.A., but not at the 5/175 level Blake was availed to, and so they struck a compromise: a 4-year deal with a player option in Year 5, while Griffin forwent a no-trade clause, a clause which NBA teams are loathe to include. It’s a business arrangement, plain and simple – one which, almost immediately, the Clippers wanted to get out of.
And somehow, almost impossibly, the Clippers found a trade partner, a team that was willing to take on one of the largest contracts in NBA history. That would be the Detroit Pistons, a storied and one-time gloried franchise whose fortunes started to slip about the time they took Darko Miličić instead of Carmelo Anthony with the 2nd pick in the NBA draft and who’ve dwindled into complete mediocrity ever since. Just as the Clippers have been in the past, Detroit is operated by a dual coach/GM executive in Stan Van Gundy. Just as the Clippers, the coaching ability of Stan Van Gundy on the floor has been hampered by the incompetence of Van Stan Gundy in the front office, as almost nothing he has done as an executive has worked. One of the amazing ironies of that Clippers choke against the Rockets is that one of the Rockets heroes was Josh Smith, a huge Detroit free-agency signing who was a disaster and who the Rockets picked up on the cheap, and who Detroit is still paying to this day. Detroit’s roster is a mess, a comedy of errors resulting from overpays, whiffed draft picks, and simply not understanding the CBA. (The Pistons hilariously hard-capped themselves last summer paying out $21 million for Langston Galloway, whom you may not even remember is in the NBA.) The Pistons reportedly lost $45 million last season, and their move into the new Pizza Pizza! Arena in downtown Detroit has been met with a sea of empty red seats. The Pistons are desperate to make the playoffs, desperate for a superstar to put asses in seats, and SVG is desperate to save his job.
Which, of course, is who you should immediately make a trade with. Rule #1 of NBA operations should be to find the guy desperate to make a trade and deal with him.
Now, Blake could be just fine in Detroit. His game could continue to age gracefully, becoming even more nuanced and cerebral. He could stay healthy and see out the 4+ remaining on his deal. But what’s mind blowing about this is that the Pistons willingly just took on $141 million remaining of his contract (and it will almost certainly be the full $141 million, because that last year’s player option is for $39 million and there is no way in hell you’d opt out of that), and paired it with another enormous contract in center Andre Drummond, and a team which had no flexibility at all to begin with now has even less than before. This is your team, Detroit. This is what you’re going to be. The backcourt is still terrible, the bench is not good, the young players haven’t gotten better. Optimists want to point out that you’re pairing Blake with a center, in Drummond who, unlike DJ in L.A., has a multitude of skills and can pass the ball and do more things. Well, sure, Drummond can pass the ball if there is someone to pass to – the majority of his assists this season having gone to baskets by Avery Bradley and Tobias Harris, the two guys who got traded back to Los Angeles in the Griffin deal. I have no idea how this is going to work.
But I can understand how the Pistons are desperate here. Prior to this trade, they’d lost 8 in a row and slipped three games out of the East playoff picture. The deal surprised me on the Clippers end more, because the Clippers have been surprisingly good this year and – GASP! – surprisingly fun. After suffering a whole tonne of injuries during the season, the Clippers have had to go young and scrappy, and Doc has actually had to go back to coaching again instead of just rolling the ball out for his superstars, and Doc’s done a great job on the bench as the Clippers have been actually competitive. Given that the New Orleans Pelicans are quite likely to sink after the awful Achilles injury to Boogie Cousins, and given that the Denver Nuggets continue to blow games and be one of the five worst-coached teams in the NBA, the Clippers actually still had a good shot to make the playoffs … and yet, they decided that now was the time to set themselves on fire.
And while I think it’s a good idea for the Clips to get off that contract, and try to create some more flexibility in their payroll, what is that flexibility for? This is where that strange and entirely fanciful notion of Clippers exceptionalism, built up over the past six years, comes into play. The Clippers are not a free agent destination. They are still a strange organization with no history of success – and now, with a roster absent Blake and, if they can swing another deal, absent the enormous contract of Jordan, they also have no great talent to build around. Almost immediately in the aftermath of this trade, there is a juxtaposition of the Clippers’ present and future fortunes with that of the Lakers, who are trying somehow to free up enough money this summer to have room for two max players. What’s not clear to me is why a Lakers team devoid of functional talent and awash in melodrama is somehow going to become a marquee destination again. Sure, the mystique and the lure of living in Los Angeles can be a draw, but who really wants to be Lonzo Ball’s babysitter? And as big a mess as the Lakers are, that mystique and past history is still of greater allure than anything that the Clippers can offer. This is where NBA logic often runs its course. “Oh, hey, look, we have cap space!” Yeah, sure, you have cap space, but your team is also garbage.
The best way for the Clippers to have ensured a bright future would’ve been to take full advantage of what was the best period in the franchise’s history, and they didn’t do that. This could have been their time, their era. Given how pathetic the Lakers had become, this was their opportunity to truly make their mark in Los Angeles – and yet they didn’t do that. It’s a hard-sell regardless – not even winning a World Series pushed the Angels past the Dodgers in the hearts of minds of SoCal faithful, even though the Dodgers have now been titleless for 30 years. The Clippers, as had been constructed, constitute a terrible missed opportunity, a fluky confluence of talent which couldn’t get it together when the opportunity presented itself, and who didn’t see the juggernaut coming up behind them from up the coast.
In fairness, no one saw the Warriors coming, but the Clippers, more than anyone else, were the ones who got run over. With Griffin’s departure, Lob City is dead, and I’ll miss Lob City. Lob City was good for the league. They were fun to hate, they were good theatre and good television in a league where the sideshows and the melodramas often make up for the fact that the final results possess little drama and intrigue. I liken the NBA very much to soccer, in that the ultimate results seem almost pre-determined. Take a look at the tables of the big European leagues at the moment: other than Serie A, all of the other top leagues are laughably lopsided, the results having pretty much been determined before the calendar year even turned over. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. I will continue to be amused by the fact that the ascent of the Warriors has caused the entirety of the NBA to lose its collective mind, and it’s sad not to have Kill The Clippers Nights to look forward to anymore. Kill The Trail Blazers just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Oh wait, there are still a few home games with OKC left on the schedule …
Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Would you like to commiserate because your team sucks? Drop me a line! You can email me at inplaylose@gmail.com, and when we get enough questions and comments gathered up, I’ll do another Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose.
