July 9, 2008

Half Mast

Boy, it sure is tough to be the Clippers these days, huh? First, the face of your franchise decides to opt out of his ginormous contract, then you pull a coup and ink another big time, surprise, free agent. With word on the street that you’ve been able to retain your man as well, you settle in to accept the praise – and suspicion - from your contemporaries. Life is grand. But that’s when it all goes wrong. Two other teams swoop in and throw MORE generous offers at the face of your franchise and instead of the thank-you-but-no-thank-you response you expect him to give, he simply says “hmmm...

Oh shit. Then he’s gone.

To top it off, he takes a contract deal that is perverbial pennies more with another team. In the mean time your other big free agent has signed an agreement elsewhere because you weren’t going to have the money to sign him assuming everything went as planned. Then reports surface questioning your new free agents desire to join as well.

So now what? I guess we could sing about it.

Based on the consistently bad luck/karma of Donald Sterling, I can only assume that Baron Davis will back out of his arrangement and sign with a contender for the midlevel exception and all other free agent offers will be met with either silence or matched by another team. The rest of their team is pretty bad. Not untalented, just not good. Cuttino Mobley hasn’t been an NBA-calibur player in 5 years. Chris Kaman has the attention span and focus of a puppy on coke. Eric Gordon is a rookie. The only “shining light” they have for next season is Al Thornton, and he played college ball at Florida State. Home attendence could suck next season.

In one fell swoop, the Clippers may lose two big-time free agents and screw up signing their first All-Star caliber point guard since Mark Jackson left a decade-and-a-half ago. It may not end up that way. Maybe Baron will sign and they can sign Josh Smith away from Atlanta. But this is the Clippers we’re talking about, so I have a hard time believing anything other than worst case scenario. Of course if they had suceeded in re-signing Elton Brand he probably would've ended up like Shaun Livingston.

Just glad we could help.

4 comments:

Dickfer said...

Clippers fan. Sad.

Marko finds Shaq funny. Kaman does NOT.

Drew Boatman said...

Dave, you continue to make this blog shine.

Anonymous said...

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Anonymous said...

You have to express more your opinion to attract more readers, because just a video or plain text without any personal approach is not that valuable. But it is just form my point of view