In professional sports, the gut instinct of the neutral fan is to root for the little brother.
The Mets, Angels, UCLA, Jets and other teams I’m forgetting are all far less hated than the team they share their cities with by most. And why shouldn’t they be? Oftentimes, a city can only truly support one team. Both teams can usually sell out arenas or stadiums, but only one can truly feel intertwined with a city’s DNA.
The Los Angeles Clippers have never been that team.
They didn’t stick in Buffalo or San Diego, and since moving to LA, they’ve been constantly overshadowed by the Lakers. Not only that, but they’ve been unlucky. Blake Griffin, Sean Livingston, Elton Brand and Bill Walton all suffered injuries at the peak of their powers while with the Clippers in ways that dramatically changed the ceiling of the littlest of all the brothers in professional sports, and that doesn’t even mention the recent injuries to Kawhi Leonard and Paul George that changed the destiny of the team that felt so certain to at least make an NBA Finals after the fateful trade that brought the duo to the Clippers in 2019.
All of those factors suggest the Clippers should be lumped in with the Brooklyn Nets or the Los Angeles Chargers as teams that are, at worst, viewed by fans with indifference.
But, after the recent news that they are sending franchise legend Chris Paul home in his farewell season, it dawned on me that, to most, the Clippers don’t spawn indifference, for one reason or another.
Some in smaller markets can’t get past the “LA” on the jersey. Some hate that they’ve given the Oklahoma City Thunder, a budding, potentially dynastic force as is, a chance to land a top-five pick in a loaded 2026 NBA Draft.
But, for my money, it’s how they’re run.
The Clippers have always been kind of gross. I’ll go into more detail on the specific events that caused this, but between the tenure Donald Sterling has as their owner, mixed with an unwillingness to stay put and a history of mistreating the few superstars they have had, the Clippers feel like the rarest thing in sports: the underprivileged, tortured little brother team that actually deserves it.
Leaving Buffalo, and then San Diego
Brutal relocations are a constant part of professional sports discourse.
Nearly 20 years later, there are still those who bring up the decision by the Seattle Supersonics to leave and become the Oklahoma City Thunder. Cleveland Browns fans have never forgiven Art Modell for moving the team to Baltimore, even after Cleveland was given a new team just three years later.
But for whatever reason, possibly because of their general irrelevance, perhaps because it was nearly 50 years ago or maybe because Buffalo and San Diego aren’t as respected nationally as Cleveland and Seattle, the Clippers have dodged any trace of criticism for a bizzare sequence of decisons that led to the team spending the past 40 years in a city that doesn’t, and hasn’t ever, cared about them.
Buffalo is a football town. It is now, and it always was, but the Buffalo Braves were in town for eight seasons after being added to the NBA as an expansion team in 1970-71. In those eight seasons, the Braves were blessed with multiple Hall of Famers, including an MVP in 1974-75 with Bob McAdoo and Moses Malone. Due to this, they eventually became a decent draw. Despite the harsh conditions of Buffalo and lots of competition with the Sabres and Bills, the Braves drew near league-average attendance, but due to clashes in scheduling, the owner felt the situation was untenable, and wanted to move the team.
The team was then sold to John Y. Brown, who traded away the team’s stars and ran future championship coach Jack Ramsay out of town. In the end, this led to an unprecedented move when Brown was able to trade franchises with the then-owner of the Boston Celtics, Irv Levin, who had wanted to move the NBA’s most historic franchise to the West Coast. The NBA wouldn’t let him move the Celtics, but it certainly didn’t care if it upended the Buffalo franchise. So, in a move that has slipped through the cracks of NBA history, the Braves and Celtics owners traded teams, and Levin moved the Braves to San Diego, where they became the organizational disaster we now know as the Clippers.
Of course, they didn’t last there, either.
Levin quickly grew tired of owning a team after the move, selling the Clippers to Donald Sterling just three seasons after coming to San Diego, and Sterling immediately made it clear he wanted to move the team to Los Angeles. Along the way, just one season into his ownership, he was already showing the league and its fans who he was, refusing to fly the team on a private plane or first-class seats, a requirement of the CBA at the time, missing payments on hotel rooms and bus trips and all sorts of other things.
He quickly tried to move the team to LA, but was blocked by the league, which caused Sterling to file an antitrust lawsuit against the NBA. He lost and was countersued by the league, and during the time of the countersuit, it was found that he had missed payments to creditors and players.
Despite the denial by the league, Sterling continued to try and move the team to LA, completely disregarding the fans in San Diego, just like the franchise had done to its fans in Buffalo, the entire time. The league eventually said it would disband the team if Sterling continued to try and move them, so he sued again. This time, Al Davis of the Raiders, who had just been through a similar situation trying to move his team from Oakland to LA, had just won a court case against the NFL, setting a precedent that Sterling would likely win the case and get his way, along with $100 million from a league that was far from swimming in money.
So, the league backed off and Sterling got his wish, burning the bridge with another city in the process and leaving Buffalo and San Diego in his wake, all for the Clippers to become an unprofitable sideshow in Los Angeles.
The Donald Sterling Era
So, as we went over, in his first season as owner of the team, Sterling had already refused to fly his players in first class despite league rules, missed hotel and bus payments, missed payments to the creditors that allowed him to come up with the $12.5 million he needed to buy the team and, most damning, had missed payments to players, all while coming up with the money to sue the league to move a team that had just gotten to San Diego three years earlier and had Bill Walton, one of the best players in the NBA, on its roster.
This would be far from the only troubling situation Sterling would find himself in as the Clippers owner.
The tip of this iceberg is Sterling’s poor treatment of the players.
For years before his removal, it was known that Sterling saw the players as his own entertainment more than human beings who worked to make him billions of dollars.
Baron Davis, who spent 2.5 seasons with the team, has publicly talked about Sterling’s demeaning and racist behavior toward players, describing Sterling as having a “Plantation Mentality.” He was also open about how Sterling would bring women into the locker room after games while the Clippers players were showering and make comments like “look at their beautiful black bodies,” while sometimes feeling the muscles of his players and inviting those who came into the locker room with him to do the same. Other former Clippers, such as Elgin Baylor, Griffin and Brand also talked about his locker room behavior, with Livingston once saying that Sterling would “linger” around the showers, making players uncomfortable.
Sterling was also notoriously cheap for an NBA owner, having multiple occurrences of being unwilling to pay for the medical care of team staff and refusing to pay for a practice facility.
Sterling was also sued multiple times for sexual misconduct, with at least three known lawsuits spanning from 1996 to 2014, accusing Sterling of offering money for sexual favors, making unwanted contact and asking the women to “recruit sexual partners for him.”
Sterling was also well-known for being racist toward players, which eventually led to his banishment from the NBA in 2014 when he was recorded by his then-girlfriend Vanessa Stiviano making racist remarks.
On the tape, Sterling makes multiple remarks, including, but not limited to, the following.
“In your lousy f—ing Instagram, you don’t have to have yourself walking with black people,” Sterling told Stiviano. “It bothers me a lot that you want to promote, broadcast that you’re associating with black people. Do you have to?”
Then, when Stiviano asks Sterling if he knows he has a team that plays for him and has black players, he responds with the following.
“Do I know? I support them, and give them food and clothes and cars and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game?”
He also once told Baylor, the former general manager of the team, that he wanted a team composed of “poor black boys from the south and a white head coach,” according to a 2009 lawsuit.
Sterling was a cancer to the NBA and Clippers organization for 30+ years, singlehandedly making a team that housed some of the most electric talents of the 2010s one of the most unlikeable in the NBA for many.
A post-Sterling era marred by misfortune
Once Steve Ballmer bought the Clippers, everything changed.
Their facilities are at the top of the league, including the Intuit Dome, a basketball palace fully funded by Ballmer that is considered to be the best new-age arena in the NBA by most. There have been no reports of player mistreatment or internal controversy. Ballmer spends as much money as any owner in the NBA and does everything in his power to keep his team competitive.
But, looking back to the final years of Sterling and the early years of Ballmer, the most constant thing about the organization was Chris Paul.
He is the owner of the brightest moment in franchise history with his Game 7 Game Winner against the San Antonio Spurs to advance to the second round of the playoffs. He is the greatest player in Clippers history in terms of both individual and team success. He is a legend of the game of basketball, easily earning a spot as one of the seven best point guards ever to play.
Since he was traded to the Rockets in 2017, the Clippers have been nothing but disappointing.
Soon after trading Paul, the Clippers signed Griffin to an extension, just to trade him to the Pistons and begin a rebuild with the assets they acquired from the two deals. They used some of these assets to move up in the draft and select Shai Gilgeous-Alexander with the 11th pick.
Later, they used even more of those assets, including Gilgeous-Alexander, to make an earth-shattering trade, one that is at the root of a lot of the frustration with the franchise from most fans. Famously, the Clippers traded Gilgeous-Alexander, Danilo Gallinari and rights to have or swap seven first-round draft picks to the Oklahoma City Thunder for Paul George, eventually pairing George with Leonard for what was supposed to be the best era in the history of Clippers basketball.
Now Gilgeous-Alexander has won a championship in OKC and is continuing to ascend toward basketball immortality, one of those picks turned into Jalen Williams, an All-NBA player who scored 40 in an NBA Finals game last season, and now, the historically dominant Thunder, already boasting a team built on the back of the Clippers’ succeses and lack there of, could have one of the five best chances to earn the first overall pick in the 2026 NBA Draft on behalf of the Clippers.
George is now gone, a member of the Philadelphia 76ers, and the Clippers are falling apart.
Even with their struggles this season, one thing any NBA fan could respect about the league’s resident laughing stock is that, in his farewell season, the Clippers brought Paul home to finish out his career in the place that defined him.
He was struggling, sure, but he’s also on a minimum contract and was giving the team minutes here and there at 40 years old. But, in the most Clippers way possible, they’ve ruined that, too.
According to a report by Chris Haynes, the Clippers have sent Paul home, essentially cutting off ties with the best player in the history of the franchise just a week after he announced it would be his final season. According to Shams Charania, Paul had been vocal in holding coaches, players and management accountable in a way the team felt was disruptive.
What was he disrupting?
The team is currently 5-16 despite a great season from James Harden and an excellent Leonard when he’s been healthy.
It sounds harsh, but it’s true — the Clippers suck. And if they were going to agree to bring Paul back, what did they think was going to happen? He’s always been critical and vocal, even when things are going well. It’s what has given him the edge he’s needed to succeed at the highest level despite his small stature.
Instead of taking the sage words of an experienced basketball genius in Paul and trying to use them to improve, they decided he was the problem. Just like they did the first time. Just like they have any time a great player has walked through the doors of their facility, whether it’s been a decrepit one run by Sterling, or a state-of-the-art one run by Ballmer.
Over the decades, the Clippers have earned their place in the NBA. A doormat.
Even at their best, the Clippers made just one conference finals, and that could easily be washed away by a scandal that alleges Ballmer and the Clippers paid Leonard tens of millions under the table to try and cheat the salary cap.
No matter what, the Clippers have always gotten in their own way and burned every bridge possible. In Buffalo and San Diego. With legends like Paul, Griffin, Davis and McAdoo and with any player who came into the locker room for 30 years, the Clippers have messed up.
And now, for a team embroiled in scandal once again, on the verge of giving the NBA’s best team a potential top-five pick, with a coach who hasn’t won a game of consequence since 2016 and a general manager who agreed to the worst trade in the history of the league, the Clippers have decided to mistreat yet another player.
Paul deserves better than the team that has, without argument, been the worst run in the NBA since it first came to be in 1970. He is one of the greatest players of all time. He’s positively impacted the community on and off the court, no matter what city he’s been in and he’s beloved by the fanbases in Houston, New Orleans and Oklahoma City, despite being traded from all of them.
The Clippers are the opposite of Paul. Regardless of city, owner, or players, the Clippers are the Clippers and they do the hardest thing to do in sports — make themselves a hateable loser.
Excellent story!