In retrospect, maybe it would have hurt less had Chris Paul missed that shot.
When the Los Angeles Clippers point guard, practically playing on one leg, hit the basket that beat the San Antonio Spurs. At the time, some called Paul’s Game 7 game-winner, which eliminated the defending champions in the first-round of the playoffs, the single greatest moment in Clippers history. It was a sign that a running joke of a franchise was finally moving on from the darkness of the Donald Sterling days into the the bright lights of the Steve Ballmer era.
In the aftermath of the Clippers’ dramatic collapse in their semi-finals, Paul’s shot looks more like the setup to a painful practical joke. Thursday night, the Clippers were on the threshold of making it to the Western Conference Finals for the first time in team history. The Clippers were up 3-2 over the Houston Rockets in the series and had built a 19-point lead late in the third quarter. There was nervous expectation in the air, as if Staples Center was on the cusp of a joyous eruption, the kind usually reserved for Lakers fans.
In an alternate universe, Game 6 would have been remembered for Blake Griffin’s spectacular 180 spin and layup, it’s the kind of highlight reel play that provides the perfect exclamation mark on a cathartic victory. Unfortunately it will be remembered now mostly as the moment that Griffin emptied out his arsenal. It wasn’t the end of the game, it was the third quarter and after unleashing the move Griffin failed to score again that night.
When Griffin went cold, the Rockets heated up, going on a 45-10 run in the fourth quarter. With James Harden, their best player, mostly on the bench, Houston stunned LA by turning what should have been a blow-out loss into a double-digit victory.
Normally when describing dramatic collapses, one includes a disclaimer saying that the losing team’s failures shouldn’t take anything away from what the winning team managed to do. When it comes to Game 6, the Clippers’ failures should take nearly everything away from what the Rockets accomplished. Houston won this game in the same way someone “wins” a fight against an opponent who knocks themselves out while tripping over their own shoelaces.
Houston’s comeback wasn’t the result of any clever strategy on the part of head coach Kevin McHale beyond a vague “Hey, this guy is scoring somehow, might as well keep him in.” It’s difficult to imagine that the team planned ahead of time to sit MVP candidate James Harden, with the playoffs on the line, so that Josh Smith, cut mid-contract by the woeful Detroit Pistons earlier in the season, could launch the types of three-pointers he had been reliably bricking ever since he left Atlanta.
The Rockets ended up winning by the comfortable margin of 119-107. There would be a Game 7 and it would be in Houston.
Game 6 was one of those shocking losses that teams rarely come back from, so the Clippers’ 113-100 loss to the Rockets on Sunday felt almost predetermined. It barely even felt like a game, more like an epilogue to Game 6’s bewildering climax. The Rockets, just the ninth team to overcome a 3-1 series deficit in the NBA Playoffs, advanced to the Conference Finals for the first time since 1997.
Following the loss, Magic Johnson, Los Angeles Lakers legend and indirect catalyst of Sterling’s overdue NBA exile, probably echoed the thoughts of many about the other LA-based team, by tweeting that “the Clippers are still the Clippers.”
I thought the Spurs taught the Clippers how to win after a tough 7 game series. I was wrong. The Clippers are still the Clippers.
— Earvin Magic Johnson (@MagicJohnson) May 17, 2015
It’s not a statement that needs much unpacking. Since relocating to LA in 1984, the Clippers and their fans have suffered through countless losing seasons, disappointments during their team’s very rare postseason appearances and inevitably ugly off-the-field controversies.
This has led to talk of there being a Clippers curse, which is ridiculous. There’s no reason to bring the supernatural into the equation to explain your team’s suffering, not when the team’s owned by a racist slumlord who had a history of dreadful decision making and even worse people skills. The Clippers weren’t cursed any more than M Night Shyamalan has “bad luck” when it comes to making movies. When the person nominally in charge is terrible at what they do, likely successes become regrettable failures.
Of course, for the first time since the team moved to LA, there is no Sterling to blame for the Clippers’ misfortune, with the exception of his estranged wife Shelly, who still skulks about Staples Center in the official capacity as the team’s No1 fan. There’s probably someone creating a new curse out there right now, certainly a team that employs Matt Barnes has at least some amount of bad karma due, but the more boring explanation may lie in that first-round victory over the Spurs.
Paul, their most important player, missed the first two games against the Rockets thanks to the hamstring injury he suffered at the end of that draining seven game series. The Clippers managed to split those two games in Houston, but the effort put an additional burden on Griffin, who at times was visibly exhausted. It didn’t help that DeAndre Jordan found himself in foul trouble while the Clippers’ bench was almost as bad as advertised, even factoring in Austin Rivers’s unexpected takeover in Game 3. There are reasonable explanations to be had here.
Not that any of these theories will make the Clippers collapse easier for diehard fans to accept. In their first season under new ownership, the Clippers had a chance to go deeper into the playoffs than they ever had before. They were minutes away from the culmination of an extended basketball exorcism that began with Sterling’s sale of the Clippers. Paul’s near-miraculous game-winner against the Spurs was a sign. it had to be.
There was hope. That’s what made this collapse so painful for Clippers fans: there’s nothing that makes failure hurt quite so much as the promise of success, especially after you’ve gone so long without it.
