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Who wants to be a Clipper millionaire?
By Mark Kreidler
Special to ESPN.com
Hey, you potential NBA draftees, playing for the Los Angeles Clippers isn't so bad. You get pro sports salaries -- well, a couple of guys do, anyway. You ply your wares in some cool venues -- just not your own. You have a chance, day in and day out, to compete against some of the best athletes in the world.
|  | | Lamar Odom is the latest Clipper draft pick to feel the crush of a losing season. |
You lose, of course.
But you do compete.
Did we mention the part about the losing?
So anyway, how about those cool venues?
Playing for the Clippers has to be like getting stuffed in the stowage area of the luxury liner. You're in the elite, right? Anybody would tell you that. You are playing in the N-B-freakin'-A, and that's where everybody in the hoops world wants to be, and so it can't be all bad, can it?
Can it?
Exhibit A: Lamond Murray.
Exhibit B: Michael Olowokandi.
Exhibit C: Lamar Odom.
Examples D through Z: You name it. Ron Harper begged his way out. Danny Manning begged his way out. Danny Ferry, coach Larry Brown, most of the Clips' fans -- they all pounded on the exit door until the thing blew down and allowed them to escape.
But that's history. Here's the new news: Nobody wants to go to the Clippers now, either.
With the draft approaching, there had been talk that if the Clippers made a play for Stromile Swift with the No. 3 pick, he might re-think his whole coming-out-of-college strategy. Imagine that: A franchise so inept, with such a wafting scent attached to its reputation, that it could actually scare kids back into school. (Swift has since said he's staying in the draft.)
This might be the NBA's most effective weapon yet in discouraging the early departure from college of its "talent pool," although you figure it isn't precisely what the league had in mind. But from the CBA to the European leagues to Asia and back to the NBA's own developmental league, the truth is that there are any number of outlets for guys who just plain don't want to play for the Clippers -- and if all else fails, exercise that loophole and go back to class.
The whole Donald Sterling angle has been done to death, and, now that you mention it, so have the Clippers. Simply done to death.
Cause of death: Acute Sterlingation.
It isn't often that the entire interested world agrees on the solution to a problem without a single thing ever being done about it, but that's what you've got around the Sports Arena these days. Look, why get cute or complicated about it? Donald Sterling, for everything he says he is and everything he may (or may not) want his franchise to be, is the Alpha and the Omega of the Clippers' woes. You need not look past the owner.
Owners have screwed up franchises throughout the course of sports history,
of course, and by and large it's barely a noteworthy item. What happens is, these men and women find themselves remarkably ill-suited to owning a sports business instead of a lampshade manufacturing plant, and have the common good sense and the sporting decency to get out.
Not so this Donald, a man who has overstayed his welcome for so long you half-expect David Stern either to call the cops or double Sterling's rent. Mistake compounds mistake; bad decision leads to ridiculous decision; but the Donald is forever.
Sterling wouldn't move out of the dated, stinky Sports Arena despite having had an open door at the Pond in Anaheim for a few years. The reason? It was too long a drive for the Donald and his pals. And that's not to mention the fact that the guys could pretty much sit anywhere in the arena they wanted.
And so what happens? Why, of course: The Donald is rewarded for his raging hoops incompetence by getting upgraded to the fancy-pants Staples Center. It's like watching a guy bust 21 in blackjack at the same table all night, then handing him a bag of playing chips on the way out of the casino. Cumulative lesson: None.
For years, people have been wondering how Elgin Baylor could keep his job at the top of the Clippers' basketball operations. This isn't a remotely fair question. The fair question goes as follows: How is it possible that after all these years, we still haven't really got the slightest idea WHAT Elgin Baylor can or cannot do as an NBA executive?
Is it possible that, given actual support in an actual basketball framework, Baylor could be proved a fair hoops man instead of the guy with Bo Kimble on his draft résumé? It is possible. In fact, we'd argue that it is bloody well likely. What good organizations do is to discern what their best people are really good at, and then exploit that talent.
What the Clippers do is what you've seen for the past, heavens, thousand years? It seems longer, somehow.
They get this look, the Clips' best and the brightest do. You've seen it before. These young players come in all fired up, thinking they'll be the catalyst to some real change in the franchise, and maybe they play their fannies off for a while; and then they get this look.
It's the look that says, Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. Murray got the look after, shoot, a couple of weeks. Olowokandi lasted longer. Lamar Odom, gifted, talented, energized Lamar Odom -- it was a long while before being a Clipper seemed finally to start pressing down on his shoulders, like gravity suddenly giving way.
It's a terrible look. It's the worst look in the NBA. Players want to avoid it at all costs. And you know what? In the remarkable end, they just might.
Mark Kreidler is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, which has a web site at http://www.sacbee.com/.
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