Piece by: Brian Saal
For fourteen years, it was football. Growing up in New England with Brady, Moss, Welker, Gronk, Bruschi, Seymour, Harrison, Belichick — how could it not be? Baseball was fine, hockey was fine, basketball was fine. Nothing matches Brady deep to Moss, down the sideline, touchdown Patriots. Vinatieri, kick is up, it’s good, not once but twice, picked off by Harrison, back to back, dynasty. That’s just the way it was. But everything turns, especially when you’re a teenager. I was a freshman in high school when it happened.
In early October at St. John’s High, there was a sale. If we hawked enough magazines, candy bars, whatever it was, we got a free day off from school to take whenever we wanted. This was magical. To be granted a day off taken at my own discretion was an extraordinary privilege after years spent as a prisoner of the Worcester Public school system. I’d be right back to those dilapidated halls in less than a year’s time, disillusioned by the prestigious uniformity of Catholic school, but for now, I was still in Heaven. I did my duty for Christ and sold what I needed to, resolving to save my Get Out of School Free Card for a rainy day. Portending a long future of poor impulse control, I spent it almost immediately. There was a basketball game on the West Coast one night, you see, and for reasons that a decade after still aren’t entirely clear, I needed to watch it.
I first became enamored with the Los Angeles Clippers when, on some snow-blasted afternoon in the dark heart of February, I saw they had traded defensive stalwart Marcus Camby to Portland for the middling duo of Steve Blake and Travis Outlaw. Even as someone who didn’t know too much about basketball, I found this deal to be unfathomably dumb. In hindsight, it wasn’t that bad. The 2009-10 Clippers weren’t going anywhere with Camby. They desperately needed guard help off the bench. Still though. Blake and Outlaw would both be gone in free agency the following year, and the Clippers couldn’t even squeeze a second round pick out of the Blazers for a guy who would go on to give Portland 114 starts. After a little reading, I found out that the Clippers, for whom I had barely spared a thought over the preceding years of my life, were actually the worst team in basketball history, perhaps the worst team in all of sports. Their ineptitude was fascinating. I couldn’t help but take to them.
With that brand of brash contrarianism that uniquely possesses the young and the ignorant, I proclaimed my newfound Clippers fandom to anyone who would listen. I didn’t win anyone over, but people knew.
“Brian likes the Clippers now.”
“Why?”
“Who knows?”
For a while, not even I could answer that question. At least, not until one fall evening, when a 6’9’’ forward from Oklahoma, number 32, would permanently lodge basketball in my mind as the sport above all others. His name was Blake Griffin, and man, he could fly. My chosen day off was October 28th, 2010. The 27th was Blake’s first game, against those same Portland Trail Blazers that had fleeced the Clips a few months prior. I wanted to watch, mostly just to project the fantasy that yes, I did in fact pursue pleasures both intriguing and exotic. Who in New England likes a basketball team from Los Angeles, let alone the ugly one? It was all very theatrical, the kind of stunt that is typically, despite all of my protests to the contrary, “just a phase.” What ended up happening was far from it. Even if this had started as a phase, it became something more with about 8:40 to go in the first quarter.
“This is the debut for the Clippers, the Blazers won...and on cue! Blake Griffin with his first NBA basket!”
- Mike Tirico
Or, as legendary Clippers broadcaster Ralph Lawler so famously put it,
“The lob, the jam!”
- Ralph Lawler
Up to this point, I had only watched Celtics basketball, and sparingly. Boring old Big 3, defense-heavy Celtics basketball. One ferocious slam from Blake was all it took to hook me forever. And he didn’t just do it once. He did it again. And again. And again. 214 times that season alone. All over the place. Timofey Mozgov, Danilo Gallinari, Pau Gasol, and many more were sent to early graves by the power and insane vertical of Griffin, who played for, of all teams, the Great Unloved, the LA Clippers. I was vindicated in my bizarre half-choice. After that first dunk, it wasn’t a choice. Love never is.
The 2010-11 Clippers were exciting, but never all that good. The tide only really turned when the team traded for superstar point guard Chris Paul in the winter of 2011, just days before the start of a lockout shortened season. Upon learning of the acquisition, Griffin christened the squad with a nickname that would define the first truly meaningful era of Clippers basketball, for better and for worse — “It’s gonna be Lob City.”
There they are. Those two words. “Lob City.” Flash. Finesse. Fire. For the first time ever, the Los Angeles Clippers were championship contenders. Yet the whispers continued. The interminable mantra of the hater and the smug talking head on ESPN — “it’s still the Clippers.” The team was cursed, they said. In the end, this would all fall apart, because “it’s still the Clippers.” They were right. Despite the ousting of the racist and miserly Donald Sterling, despite rising to heights never before experienced by players who wore “Clippers” on the front of their uniform, it came tumbling down before anyone could really tell what had happened. Like Rome before it, Lob City was destroyed from within long before the wolves came picking at the corpse. The battery of Griffin, Paul, and Deandre Jordan spent six seasons as a force to be reckoned with. Between the 2011-12 and 2016-17 campaigns, the Clippers won 313 games, tied for third most in the league over that span. Only Golden State and San Antonio won more in the regular season. Of course, both of those teams also won championships. The other 313-game winner, the Oklahoma City Thunder, made the Finals in 2012, and made the Western Conference Finals in two other seasons. Right below the Clippers at 292 regular season victories are the Miami Heat, who won two titles with their own Big 3. Below them, the Memphis Grizzlies, who made the conference finals in 2013, and the Houston Rockets, who...well, we’ll get to them in time. The Lob City Clippers never even made it past the second round.
It all came to a close on June 28th, 2017, when I woke up to the news that Chris Paul had been traded to Houston. I’d been hearing that Lob City had “one more year” before they had to blow things up for a few seasons now. That year had finally come and gone without even a conference finals appearance, and like that, it was over. I was shocked and hurt, but deep down, I knew it was time. It had been time for a while. Between ill-timed injuries, crushing and fluky losses in the playoffs, bizarre off-court incidents, and the constant insistence by everyone but the team themselves that they had “chemistry issues”, the Clippers had endured enough heartbreak in six years to last most fans a lifetime. For the team to move forward, it had to end. Like all breakups, it took a while to get over, and reminders loitered about Staples Center for the rest of the 2017-18 season. Blake was shipped to Detroit in February, and Deandre left for Dallas at season’s end. By the start of 2018-19, the only standing brick of the Temple of Lobs and Jams was coach Doc Rivers. Healing was a process. But it happened. While the season is on pause for the moment, the Clippers are better positioned than ever before, as superstar wings Kawhi Leonard and Paul George have combined forces to put the new look group near the top of the Western Conference for years to come.
Years to come, years gone by. If Kawhi brings a title to LA, for the underdogs, for the put-upon, the cursed, he’ll be a hero for all time. He’ll get a statue outside of the new stadium in Inglewood. He will be immortal. But what about Chris Paul? What about Blake Griffin? What about DJ? What about JJ Redick, Austin Rivers, Jamal Crawford, and Matt Barnes? Hell, what about Lance Stephenson and Wesley Johnson? When the story of basketball is written, they’ll be consigned to that pitiable dustbin of teams that couldn’t hack it, remarkably talented groups who still never reached the top of the mountain. Stockton’s Jazz, Nash’s Suns, Moncrief’s Bucks. Outside of a passing mention, Lob City will be forgotten. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”
I won’t forget, though. How could I? I grew up with the Patriots, but I grew into who I am today with the Clippers. I learned despair, elation, hope, disappointment, all the world had to offer. All the while, this team, this stupid, wonderful team, that for some reason couldn’t make it over the hump, that always made games closer than they had to be, but doesn’t that make them more exciting?, that crafted masterpiece after masterpiece from the most towering heights of bliss to the darkest depths of agony, this team just kept churning along. And I kept watching, because what is basketball if not an endless narrative reflecting the lives of those who watch and bleed and die and celebrate and live with their teams? I don’t intend to let them fade into moonlight and stardust hanging over I-110. In this series I’ll be exploring personal recollections of mine that even I will eventually forget. Games, players, stories from this most electric era of Los Angeles basketball, where for a few shining moments it looked like Showtime truly had been resurrected, and that the ghosts of Blake and CP3 and DJ would roam the halls of the Staples Center with Shaq and Kobe and Magic and Kareem, as equals, long after all of us have gone. Those moments are over, but they aren’t lost. As Brandon Flowers of the Killers puts it, “the season may pass, but the dream doesn’t die.”
These are the dreams, and the nightmares, of a young basketball fan in the 2010’s.
These are Scattered Memories From Lob City.