By Randy Hill
FOXSportsArizona.com
December 17, 2010
The roll call includes one of the league's best young big men, a rocket-launched power forward who spends more time working to improve than watching himself in televised, orbital highlights.
This kid shares the stage with a gifted shooting guard who won't turn 22 until Christmas Day, or about three months after he helped Team USA capture the World Championship. Future considerations also include a pair of rookies already in the rotation and enough short-term, on-court calamity to all but guarantee another marvelously high draft pick.
But rather than plot the chronology of this team's inevitable rise to glory, veteran NBA followers shrug their shoulders and wait for the anvil to land.
See, these are the Los Angeles Clippers, a franchise with a greater history of runaway misery than Charlie Sheen's publicist. The in-game disasters have presented 21 seasons with 50 or more defeats since 1981. Within the Keystone Kops-caliber performances, we rewind to see catastrophic injuries for Danny Manning, Ron Harper, Norm Nixon, FOX analyst Marques Johnson (while running into the gut of teammate Benoit Benjamin), the late (and on the road to great) Derek Smith, Shaun Livingston and even Blake Griffin, the aforementioned four man.
While draft-night boo-boos include several shaky picks that other teams might have duplicated, the tattered Clippers resume offers Michael Olowokandi at No. 1, Benjamin at No. 3, Chris Wilcox (over Amar'e Stoudemire) and somebody named Yaroslav Korolev at No. 12 in 2005.
And while a team effort is required to stockpile enough debris to build this reputation, it seems more than logical to remind observers that the solicited mess starts at the top. Or, more correctly, in the first row near mid-court and across the court from the Clippers bench at Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles.
That's where you can find team owner Donald T. Sterling, the very least uncommon denominator in what provokes widespread support for consideration as the worst franchise in professional sports. In recent days, Sterling has commandeered a great deal of overflow notoriety for having heckled Clippers point guard Baron Davis with the game in progress.
Although heckling Davis falls under the accepted purview of fans and whatever now qualifies as the fourth estate, it has been judged beyond gauche when executed in public by an employer. But it's hardly surprising. Given his track record of reverse philanthropy and professionalism within the workplace, Sterling has a firm hold on the unofficial title of worst owner in professional sports.
For contrast, we look in the same arena, different night. Cutting a less conspicuous profile, Lakers owner Jerry Buss presides over one of the league's most successful franchises (if success is defined by championships and not how much clearance the bottom line finds between operating costs and revenues generated) from the sanctuary of his elevated suite. Although Buss, like many, views the NBA luxury tax as a Sword of Damocles, there are few (if any) public instances of grotesque penny-pinching that might compromise the Lakers on the court or even behind the scenes.
As owner of the Lakers, Buss has allowed the city and its fans to celebrate the players, coaches, dancers and broadcasters, not him.
For more contrast, we look to Dallas, where Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has been -- in certain areas -- more like Sterling than Buss. Those areas, however, are pretty much limited to visibility. Cuban, no stranger to making suggestions to employees from his courtside perch, hasn't exactly been thrifty in his pursuit of winning a championship. Even though he knows how to coax revenue from his investment, it always has been about winning . . . winning everything . . . for Cuban.
For Buss and Cuban, the greatest separation from Sterling has been in how they treat those on their payrolls.
Anyway, it should be noted that while the heckling hullabaloo provides national scribes with an opportunity to dust off their best tight-wad-related, Sterling-directed adjectives, even that is subject to a tactical rewrite. Yeah, Sterling
