How Clippers is this?

Ten hours after learning yesterday that Stephen Curry, leading man of the Golden State Warriors, will be out for two weeks, setting up the possibility of the Clippers being able to beat a weakened Warriors team in the second round of the NBA playoffs …

… Chris Paul suffers a broken right hand, repaired during surgery today, the morning after Blake Griffin also left the Monday defeat versus Portland with a recurrence of the quad injury that cost him most of the regular season — and today is declared out for the rest of the season.

And the Los Angeles Clippers go from “potential Western Conference finalists” to “dead, dead, dead here and now” without their two best players, both finished off in the same game Monday night.

Which could lead us off in the direction of the sad history of the Clippers, and whether they are cursed, etc. … but instead has me thinking about how different Chris Paul’s career might have been had not the NBA voided the deal for the star point guard that the Lakers made ahead of the lockout-delayed 2011-12 season.

The Lakers had gone out in the second round of the 2011 playoffs, to the eventual-champion Dallas Mavericks. The Lakers had been 57-25 in the regular season, behind Bryant, Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom. They were still a solid team, but they had issues at point guard, where Derek Fisher was fading.

The Lakers were ready to give up Gasol and Odom in a three-way trade that would have brought Paul from New Orleans, where he was unhappy, to the Lakers. The teams had agreed, and the players informed of the deal.

Which would have produced a Lakers team of Kobe Bryant, Andrew Bynum (before he went badly wrong), Metta World Peace, Matt Barnes — and Paul. And allows us to ask the question … could those five guys been able to contend for an NBA title in 2012?

And, if not able to beat the Miami Heat in the 2012 finals, could they have done so the season after, when they had added free-agent center Dwight Howard, whom Chris Paul might have been able to badger into his Orlando-days competence?

And if the Lakers had Paul playing point guard, they would not have made the disastrous trade for a broken-down Steve Nash (two first-round picks, two seconds), ahead of the 2013-14 season.

Instead, we have Chris Paul spending (wasting?) five seasons with the Clippers, never getting past the second round of the playoffs.

Of course, this is all speculative because NBA commissioner David Stern voided the Lakers deal for Paul, “for basketball reasons”, sending him back to New Orleans, which was at that time operated by the league.

Days later, the NBA signed off on a Paul trade — but this time to the Clippers.

More than a year ago, Kobe Bryant told GQ he was still ticked off at Stern for killing the Paul deal in the “best interests of the league”.

Said Kobe: “The Lakers pulled off a trade that immediately set us up for a championship, a run of championships later and saved money.

Bryant told GQ: “Now, the NBA vetoed that trade. But the Lakers pulled that sh-t off, and no one would have thought it was even possible. The trade got vetoed, because they’d just staged the whole lockout to restrict the Lakers. (General manager) Mitch (Kupchak) got penalized for being smart. But if we could do that …”

Well, that changes all sorts of things.

Byron Scott, in November of 2014, when he was the Lakers’ coach, said: “Yeah, sometimes you want to say, ‘Damn it, David Stern’. Yeah, you think about it. When they made the trade before David hexed it, I was like, ‘Wow. That’s going to be fantastic’.”

The Lakers, with Chris Paul in his prime, might have gone on being the Lakers, and not the ragamuffin crew ruined by the loss of all those draft picks in the Nash deal, as well as eventual injuries to Bryant.

And the Clippers might have gone on being the Clippers — except without the keen sense of frustration and ultimate failure from having Chris Paul on their roster but still not achieving anything significant.

And Chris Paul might have led a Lakers team to a championship, instead of now being at risk of joining the sad group of “best NBA players never to win a title”.

That’s what I think about. What the Lakers and Chris Paul could have done without the monstrous intervention by David Stern.

Chris Paul probably will think about it, too, as he recovers from surgery.