This is an awful time to be a Los Angeles-area sports fan. It has been mostly dreary since I left the region to live and work in Abu Dhabi, in 2009, but it seems to be bottoming out, the past four or five months. Aside from hockey, which has no significant hold on Southern California […]

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This makes me smile. If not laugh. If not snort in derision. I saw the final minutes of the Lakers’ 107-102 loss to the Clippers tonight, and when ESPN went back to the studio, the question was posed: “Is Los Angeles a Clippers town now?” This is how you will know if L.A. has become […]

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I watch/cover a lot of sports, but I don’t often have a strong opinion on how an event will turn out, before the fact. This is an exception. The Los Angeles Lakers and Denver Nuggets meet in Game 7 of their first-round NBA playoffs series tomorrow night, and I want to get on record with […]

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I cannot remember the last time I was paying such close attention to the NBA. And not just the Lakers. The whole league. (And yes, I am the same guy who three months ago wrote on this blog that the locked-out NBA could take the season off, for all I cared.) I am more interested, […]

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Generous of me, yes, to allow the Clippers to have Chris Paul — since the trade is already made and I’m not the erratic and capricious commissioner of the NBA who can step in and quash a deal. Lakers fans will be agitated about this trade, for two reasons: That Chris Paul will not be […]

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I love relegation. I knew about it, of course, long before I got off the plane in Abu Dhabi in the heavily Euro-influenced UAE. But seeing it in action … brings home what fun it is and how the NBA, the NFL, MLB could all be improved. Not that I expect this ever could happen. […]

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I was thinking about the Beijing Olympics, and realized that the U.S. men’s basketball team had zero Clippers on it. But then, neither did the Vancouver Olympics. Have any Clippers on the U.S. team. Though clipper ships presumably sailed to Vancouver, but not Beijing, it being too far from the ocean. Hong Kong? Sure. But […]

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That didn’t take long. Blake Griffin didn’t even make it to Opening Night before he was struck down … by the Clippers Curse. (Cue creepy music, imagine the late Vincent Price reading this to you aloud.) Turns out the Clippers’ blue-chip rookie forward, the top pick in the NBA draft … has a broken knee […]

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This is one of those rules that Shouldn’t Have to Be Made. But when you’ve got self-important athletes unwilling to recognize common-sense boundaries … it’s amazing what you have to get down in black and white. The NBA has banned the use of Twitter and other “social media” during a period that extends from 45 […]

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ESPN the Magazine has done a long piece on Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, by far the least successful franchise of the four “major” North American sports. The profile is interesting on several levels, but these are the two that struck me while reading it:

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