Sports
Pathetic Clippers Need Overhaul
By Todd A. Mayes
Mar 8, 2009 - 9:32:06 PM

LOS ANGELES—Enough is enough.  I’ve watched the moribund Clippers franchise stumble through, losing season after losing season, but for some reason this one is worse than most.  It’s as if I am watching a Will Ferrell movie and I can’t figure out what is worse—the movie or the actual team the movie parodies.  

Most of the time my rage is aimed at the head coach, Mike Dunleavy, who ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons correctly pointed out looks like a funeral director.  I mean have you seen his body language during a game, and more importantly, have you seen the body language of the men he is supposed to be leading?  It’s downright frightening that a profession that pays so much money and requires only that the employees play basketball to the best of their ability could produce an organization as amateurish as this one.

Then I start to realize that I sound like every other ill-informed fan when blaming the guy standing on the sideline in the cheap suit and slick-backed hair—what’s left of it. It can’t all be the coach’s fault, can it? Certainly the general manager has to share some of the blame doesn’t he? And then I remember that the coach and the general manager are the same guy—the funeral director. I wonder if he started looking like a funeral director before he took over the Clippers or if it’s one of those nature/nurture arguments that say you adapt and become what your surroundings and culture create.

Either way it is again time for Donald T. Sterling to hang a “For Sale” sign on the shop window and step away from the ashes of a burned out franchise. I’ve called on him before to do the right thing, but this time I’m serious. The Clippers have been such a joke as a franchise that the younger generations know no other way.  Some might think that this is the way it is suppose to be: The Lakers are the good L.A. team and the Clippers are the bad one. Well it doesn’t have to be that way. There are enough corporations and basketball fans in Southern California to support possibly three successful NBA franchises, let alone two.

But the powers that be ( Sterling) are content to be the punky kid brother to the Lakers All-American big brother. But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Times are tight right, Mr. Sterling? Now, I don’t run in circles with wealthy guys who could buy a car with cash let alone buy an NBA franchise with credit, but even I know someone who would jump at the chance to buy an NBA franchise or even the Clippers. In fact, he has tried in the past but was rebuffed. He has owned an ABA franchise, and before you say, “Oh, the ABA,” understand that his franchise was the only one that made money in the now defunct ABA. He has also dabbled in the NBDL and has always been liked and respected by his players because he is known as a player’s owner, a hybrid between Mark Cuban and the Maloof brothers. 

The point is this Mr. Sterling: with the economy in the tank, along with your Clippers, wouldn’t it be a good time to ride off into the sunset with a satchel of cash in tow, if not your dignity? Go ahead and keep a five percent stake in the team so that when they do the impossible and overtake the Lakers as kings of the city and the Western Conference you can still be a part of it, even though your greatest contribution will have been getting as far from the front office decisions as possible.