LOS ANGELES — If there's no such thing as change in sports – rapid change, wholesale renovation – then we should all pack up and go home. Turn off the television, Timberwolves fans. Cancel the newspaper subscriptions. There's no more hoping for a winning record, no longer any reason for a fleeting thought of the playoffs if not for that pang in the gut that dares to believe things can be different.
Change is the currency of a team like the Timberwolves. It's how they've sold tickets this year, how they've marketed themselves, with Jumbotron videos and posters smeared across the city of a shouting Spaniard who's become the image of everything that is different in Minnesota. And as the team that finished last season with just 17 wins enters March with a .500 record, it's hard to deny there's a transformation at work, even despite its 104-85 drubbing by the Lakers on Wednesday.
There's no better place than Los Angeles to analyze shift of power in the NBA, no building better than the Staples Center to contain everything that's different about 2012. It's the home of both the resurgent Clippers and the we're-not-dead-yet Lakers. It's also the site of the Timberwolves' back-to-back this week, a series that went a long way in gauging how far afoot this change has crept.
The 20-12 Clippers have been the early talk of the NBA, the team that had a 32-50 record last season and won just 29 games the year prior. With Chris Paul and Blake Griffin, they're on the upsurge, currently the third-best team in the Western Conference. They're a team of dunks and flash, raw power, and so far that's sustained them. But they're still beatable, at least to the Timberwolves.
The Lakers have at times this season been painted as the fading monarchs of the league, but they've won 21 games and lost just twice more than the Clippers. This season is a far cry from their death knell, but that ruins the story a bit, this tale of change and a new order. This would be the Clippers' city in a perfect narrative, but it's not.
A back-to-back in Los Angeles no longer means an easy night for a competent visitor. Neither team is scarier than the other, Kevin Love said on Tuesday morning, and each poses its own challenges. Mistakes won't be tolerated, and it's no longer only the Lakers who can strip a team down to its vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
"We need to bring it both games," Love said before the series. "To have a back-to-back here in L.A., it's pretty tough."
There's no questioning the truth in Love's statement, but with just a glance at the scores from Tuesday and Wednesday, little appears to have changed – in Los Angeles, at least. The Clippers lost and the Lakers won, and all was as it always has been in Southern California, or so it would seem.
Except for the Timberwolves. The team is 2-0 against the Clippers this season, 0-2 against the Lakers. Last year, it lost all four of its games against the Lakers and took just one out of four from the Clippers. The Timberwolves have already guaranteed themselves a better collective mark against the two teams this season, and with four more games against them in March, Minnesota will soon have a better idea of how high its ceiling can be against contenders.
On Wednesday, though, that ceiling did not look promising. The night played out exactly as one would expect from a Timberwolves team missing its star forward, Love, who sat out because of an illness. It was a far cry from Tuesday's fourth quarter, when Love didn't need to play, and it quickly did away with any notion they can have sustained success without him.
"It's a lot not having him, and it was also ourselves," Michael Beasley said of Love's absence. "We started out bad. We started out lackadaisical, real cool. We kind of started out still on the wave from yesterday's win, and they jumped on us."
Although the Timberwolves went into halftime down by just six, the Lakers dominated in the second half against a worn-down team. With no Love to absorb 40-plus minutes, there was no endurance, no spark and too much of players like Wayne Ellington and Anthony Tolliver, who have barely played in the past month and did little to help their causes. The team was at one point down by 27, its largest deficit of the season and only the fourth time it's trailed by 20 or more points this year.
The starters combined for just 36 points, as no one was really able to step up in Love's absence. Most striking was Ricky Rubio's stat line, which boasted just three points. The rookie has proven he may just be the star he was billed as, but he's a long way from being able to shoulder the burden of carrying a team.
"I tried to control the game, but I didn't," Rubio said. "It was my fault. That's it."
It was just one game, but after coming out so strong against the Clippers the night before, it was somehow even more discouraging. But it's the Lakers. They win championships and eviscerate opponents, so it's hard to really say what yet another loss at their hands means. It was a confusing story, these two nights in Los Angeles, where the Timberwolves beat the team that's better on paper, but lost to the one that still seems better in the flesh. There's no way to define it all.
Just look at Tuesday's 109-97 win over the Clippers. It's the most confusing of gauges, in no way capable of capturing the ascendancy of either team. What's more shocking? The Timberwolves win, or that the Timberwolves beating the Clippers should shock anyone? The latter, it would seem. Just a year ago, these were two less-than-mediocre teams, hapless and certain their seasons would end in mid-April. Now that's changed, but just watch the Lakers to see that this evolution has not yet come full-circle.
None of this rings truer or seems stranger to anyone than to rookie Derrick Williams, who grew up in the Los Angeles area as a Lakers fan. His mere presence on the court – he scored 27 points Tuesday and 10 on Wednesday – is a marker of the passage of time. Williams grew up admiring Kobe Bryant. Now he might be guarding him. But that isn't so strange. Plenty of rookies have faced their idols wide-eyed on the court. What's stranger to Williams is what went on Tuesday night, when the team he never cared much about as a kid played the Timberwolves to a full house.
"The Clippers are outselling the Lakers in tickets, and so there's a first for everything in the world," Williams said.
It's true. The Clippers are drawing a slightly larger average home crowd than the Lakers, but at the Staples Center it almost seems meaningless. It's still two different places depending on which team is playing, and there's no question it's still the Lakers' house.
"The Lakers are old school," Williams said. "I feel like they just expect to win. They've been winning for so long."
Just look at the introduction videos. The Clippers are winking and pointing. It's a little awkward, a little contrived. Blake Griffin doesn't make that face in real life. The Lakers, though, don't even pause for the camera. Their video is projected on a floor-to-ceiling sheet, a montage of big plays set to music that would make a video of something as mundane as mowing your lawn look dramatic.
The court still glows, the celebrities still flock, Kobe Bryant still takes the court with that steely gaze, even when it's blocked by a mask after he broke his nose during Sunday's All-Star Game. The Staples Center is still glittery and space-age for the Lakers and any other building when the Clippers take the court. The Clippers are a contender, sure, and maybe even the darlings of Los Angeles right now, but the Lakers are still worshipped, and the Timberwolves still can't beat them.
As stagnant as those scores might paint it all to be, things are changing. The Timberwolves are winning and so are the Clippers. And as bad as Wednesday's loss might taste, the Timberwolves took one out of two in Los Angeles. But change isn't perfect or instant in a game where two months of play is just that, nothing more than a blip on the monitor of a team's growth. And that's the other thing: If evolution were that fast, if growth weren't sometimes interrupted or kept in check, this stuff wouldn't be worth watching, either.
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