SSDL BLOG: “NBA Playoffs: The Los Angeles Clippers”
“NBA Playoffs: The Los Angeles Clippers”
June 27, 2021
“The Second of Four Profiles of the 2021 NBA Final Four”
Los Angeles, California - Okay, here goes, profile number two of the final four teams in the NBA playoffs. That makes sense, since the team coming in a distant second to the favorite professional basketball franchises in Los Angeles is the Clippers. What other team in the league would lose a key playoff game by way of an inbound lob dunk with less than a second? Many of us learned a new rule on that play at the expense of the Clippers.
The thing is, I am an L.A. guy and want all the teams in my city to do well, so it is hard for me to pile on the Clippers when they have finally made a conference final. Considering their history, however, it is even harder not to pile on.
The Los Angeles Clippers (est. 1970, Zero NBA Championships):
Founded in 1970 as the Buffalo Braves…ok, wait, that should have been the first clue to a life of bad luck for the franchise. I mean, Buffalo is an animal that Native Americans respected and needed for their way of life, but sadly, buffalos were hunted to near extinction by white traders. (Is it called genocide when it refers to an animal?) Eventually, the city was named Buffalo by the settlers, and I am guessing the surviving natives were none too pleased when they heard the team mascot’s name.
Hmm, that all seems like a recipe for a curse to me. But, who believes in curses? I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
The Braves played in the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, and that has to make you wonder, should you use the name “Memorial” for an animal you nearly committed genocide against? The Braves, despite making the NBA playoffs three times in eight years behind the scoring machine that is the Hall of Fame great Bob McAdoo, barely got to use their own home court. It seems like the more popular team in town was the Canisius College Golden Griffins. Yes, that’s right, a Division 2 college team named after a mythical creature got priority over the NBA franchise cursed by their own mascot. In Buffalo, the truth is stranger than fiction for sure.
The original Buffalo Braves owner Paul Snyder had seen enough and sold the team in 1976 to John Y. Brown Jr., a Kentuckian who built the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain into prominence. He would later marry Miss America winner Phyllis George and become Governor of Kentucky. KFC, Miss America and Governor are impressive, but a curse is a curse, so he decided to trade the franchise, curse and all, to Irv Levin, the owner of the Celtics. Yes, that’s how things went down in the 70’s NBA.
Irv Levin, an aspiring film producer, decided in 1978 to shake off the Buffalo snow and the curse of the Braves and move the franchise across the country to beautiful San Diego, California. Rebranding yourself as the Clippers after the beautiful sailing ships in San Diego Bay seemed like a grand idea, what could possibly go wrong?
In the less than appealing San Diego Sports Arena, the Clippers earned their spot as the fourth best basketball team in the 1970’s to call that so-called arena a home. The Clippers ranked behind the NBA’s San Diego Rockets, who left in 1971 for Houston, the San Diego Conquistadors of the ABA, who folded in 1976, and John Wooden’s UCLA team that won the NCAA championship in the arena in 1975.
By 1981, Clipper owner Irv Levin was busy producing the aptly named motion picture “To Live and Die in L.A.” and that seemed to be the course he set the franchise on when he sold it to real estate maven and slum-lord extraordinaire Donald Sterling. Sterling, not to be confused with the adjective that means something great, to the franchise form bad to worse. It was as if the Native Americans hand-picked the worst prick of a person they could possibly find to embarrass the franchise into oblivion.
It nearly worked.
“The Don”, not to be confused with Don Corleone, who actually knew how to run a business, made a plan to take Clippers to Los Angeles and raise the stakes on that curse.
It was 1984 and the worst owner in all of sports was bringing his cursed franchise to Los Angeles to play in an even more run down arena than they had in San Diego. The Clippers would fight for fans in a city where the Lakers and the top owner in all of sports, Jerry Buss, had just launched the “Showtime” era at the “Fabulous Forum”. What could go wrong?
For the next 27 years, the Clippers qualified for the playoffs a mere four times, winning only a single playoff round. By 2010, the team finally got something going with their “Lob City” team - But despite strong regular season records, they never could overcome the curse or the “The Don”.
Sure there were highlights, like Brent Barry becoming the only white guy to ever win an NBA All-Star Game dunk championship in 1996 or Blake Griffin jumping over a car to win another dunk title in 2011. Then there is the ever-classy 40-year career of play-by-play man Ralph Lawler. “First team to 100 wins. It’s the Law.”
But the highlights were severely dimmed by the man now wearing the crown as the worst owner in the history of professional sports. It would take an undercover “sting operation” coordinated by the FBI to crack the code of the curse and knock Sterling out. Or perhaps it would be a surgically altered, visor-wearing mistress named Viv Stiviano and TMZ. Sterling’s ugly, racially offensive audio tapes were made public in 2014, and the NBA would finally exorcise him from the league.
It would take a Doctor, a Logo and Tech Billionaire to put the franchise on a course without a curse. Doc Rivers was a steady force as a coach, Jerry West used his executive level magic as a consultant and Steve Ballmer rolled in trucks of money as the new owner.
Despite a couple more hiccups in the playoffs and a launch of a mascot named “ Chuck the Condor”, who appears to have survived some combination of in-breeding and an ecological disaster, the Clippers stayed the course. They replaced key parts, including their coach, and this year they find themselves in the Western Conference finals for the first time in franchise history.
They are no longer the NBA’s oldest franchise to have never made it this far. It just might be safe to say the curse has been lifted.
Denny Lennon is the host of the Video Podcast, “Sports Stories with Denny Lennon” and the “Preps To Olympians” Live Show, available on YouTube and LA36 CableTV in Los Angeles County.
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