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Overall
Win/Loss Record (At Season’s End): 56-26,
first place Pacific Division
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6
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At
Season’s End:
12
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Team
Statistics and League Rank (At Season’s End)
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Individual
Statistical Leaders (At Season’s End)
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Taking a Look Back at the Season that Once Was . . .
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SDH Player of the Year:
Chris Paul 
This is putting it bluntly, but Chris Paul has been the franchise's savior for the past two seasons and he Clippers would be nothing if it were not for this man. He has single handily turned a team that has been regarded as a laughing stock in professional sports into one of the NBA's most reputable teams. This season he has outdone himself as he has led his team to its first division title in franchise history along with home court advantage in the first round in the playoffs. Too bad his ambitions were put in check by an upstart Memphis Grizzlies team, but that unfortunate loss should be considered as a speed bump in the road to a bright future. As long as the Clips have Paul, the sky is the limit; however, if they do not manage to sign him long term, all their successes will be a distant memory.
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Analysis:
It was such a magical time in the 2013 NBA regular season to see a team that was so historically terrible as the Los Angeles Clippers arise to finish with not only the most ever wins in franchise history, but also their first time ever finishing first place in their division. So when the Clippers had been shockingly upset by the Memphis Grizzlies in the first round, it was met with a rather harsh sense of irony where despite such a history making season, fate would still cruelly hold the Clips back yet again. The Clips started the series winning the first two games at home Grizzlies, giving many the justification to wrote Memphis off; however, Memphis bounced back winning four straight thus cutting their season short once again. LA's first round collapse certainly deflated the impact of their history making season as fate would once again stand in the Clippers' way only allowing a team that has seen so much heartbreak suffer that stinging pain of defeat once again. Unfortunately it would not be the worst humiliation that the Clippers would have to suffer as it experience an even worse slight during the course of the regular season. Despite putting up their most earth shattering performance in franchise history, the Clippers still remained with the stigma as LA's "other team" taking the back seat once again to their hated nemesis, the Los Angeles Lakers, who had been struggling to say the least. Unlike the Clippers, even higher expectations were placed upon the Los Angeles Lakers who had picked up two of the off season's most prized gems in Dwight Howard and Steve Nash. Combined with Lakers star Kobe Bryant and All Star big man Pau Gasol, folks in LaLa Land had already chose to don the purple and gold once again as they prepared for another championship run. How shocked the denizens of LA were when their Laker team fell WAY short of expectations as they saw it scratching and clawing to survive in the West while on the flip side, the Clippers who had been under the Lakers' mighty shadow would outperform their one time tormentor and become the alpha males of the Staples Center. Sadly, instead of receiving the recogntion, love and admiration that they had so longed for, the Clips would yet again be forced to take the back seat to the Lakers as fans and the media concentrated more on the Lakers' failures rather than their own success. People were more drawn to the fact on how poorly the Lakers had been playing rather than the fact that the Clippers were playing their best ball ever in franchise history which certainly must have felt like a hard slap across the face. So imagine how the Clips felt when they not only were upstaged yet again by the Lakers despite having a far better season, but also that they would join them watching the rest the NBA playoffs at home. It was as if both the cruel hands of Fate and Destiny intervened to ensure that the Clippers not only advance in the playoffs, but also remain at the same level as the team that had tormented them for so many years. From riding so high as one of the league's most improved teams of the 2013 regular season, the Clippers crashed down back to Earth and returned to being the object of shame and ridicule once again. The Clippers' wounds probably sting even more knowing that had they managed to maintain their 2-0 league and pass the Memphis Grizzlies, they probably would have faced the San Antonio Spurs in the Western Conference Finals. After they had eliminated Memphis, they would have faced the same shorthanded Oklahoma City Thunder squad in the second round which the Grizzlies handily defeated and that would have been a far better series to watch than seeing the Spurs make short work of Memphis sweeping them in four games. Talk about being kicked while they were down: LA would have to forever live with the regret that they, in the words of cinema great Marlon Brando, ". . . could have been a contender, (they) could have been somebody." It is bad enough to be a terrible team that routinely missed the playoffs and found itself in the lottery year after year, but to play so well in the regular season just to finish so poorly can be considered far worse. At least when the Clippers were terrible, they had the draft to look forward and although they have botched it quite a few times over the years with poor selections, it was still a highlight of their season; however, now the bar has been set rather high and the Clipper have no other choice but to go "championship or bust" where good id no longer good enough. That's is why the team's front office chose not to extend head coach Vinny Del Negro's contract as once their season ended, despite him coaching the team to its best performance in its history. For those who considered the Clippers letting Del Negro take the fall as somewhat unjust, in the eyes of the Clippers to top brass it made perfect sense because they made no allusions to who truly was responsible from the team resurgence--and it certainly was not due to Del Negro's coaching. The true source of the Clipper's recent windfall of prosperity was a player that they traded for in the lockout shortened 2012 season and who has become an unrestricted free agent once the team was eliminated from the playoffs. Chris Paul has been the catalyst for the Clippers' renaissance and with numerous teams courting him for his services, the Clippers will need more than the fact that they can offer him the most money. They also need to convince him that his staying for the long haul will lead to a potential championship down the road and if it means firing a good coach in order to get a great coach to keep their star happy and in LA, then so be it. It is certainly refreshing to see this new winning attitude for a team that has spent much of its history settling for mediocre and not aspiring for anything greater. Once they manage to lock down Paul for the next five or six years, there will be no stopping the Clippers, a team that is on their way to rewriting their own history. |
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Friday, July 5, 2013
SDH Presents the 2013 End of Season NBA's Worst to First: 12. Los Angeles Clippers
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