Trainer, coach and ESPN.com contributor David Thorpe was in Minneapolis on Wednesday for the Clippers’ narrow loss to the Timberwolves. He had a chance to get a close look at the Clippers’ trio of rookie and came away with these impressions:
Blake Griffin
There’s almost nothing not to like about him. It’s a very, very short list.
When I looked up Basketball Reference’s season predictor at the beginning of the season, it said that the Clippers would win only 20 games. At the time I found it hard to believe because the Clips didn’t seem like they would be in line to take a 9 game step back with regards to their record. 12 games into the season, that 20 games is looking pretty accurate, maybe even generous.
Strange that after this start, Basketball Reference now thinks the Clippers will win 22 games, but they probably know more than me.
New city, same show. Once again, the Baby Clips play hard enough to win, but make just enough mistakes to lose. Ideally, youth movements would be all high-flying athleticism and not so much momentum-killing turnovers and mental mistakes down the stretch, but tonight saw its fair share of both. The Clippers came back from 9 down midway through the fourth quarter, briefly holding a 2 point lead inside the final 2 minutes before a Michael Beasley floater with 2 seconds left finally buried them. It’s was easy to find silver linings when the Clippers were battling back, keeping it close, and coming up just short against the Western Conference’s elite teams. Tonight just felt like a game that should have been won.
Sugarcoating a 1-10 start, when the Clippers have just lost two at home to the Detroit Pistons and the New Jersey Nets, is beyond impossible, it’s pointless. This Clippers team finds itself not so much in a hole attempting to make the playoffs, but with a fantastic start in the year to land another top draft pick. This start is so bad, that the only one worse in recent Clipper history, is the 0-17 start they had in the 1998-1999 season. While it’s great to have hope for this team, and you should for the future, it shouldn’t be used as a delusional mechanism to overlook their current large flaws. Instead of vaguely imagining of a time at a non-specific future point where the Clippers are magically better, they need to keep their hope alive, this hope being a belief that they are good players, and then get to work on fixing their problems. These dreams of the Clippers being a very good team are very real and very worthwhile, but there is a lot of work to be done between now and then. The resiliency needed to get there has to be shown now and not just in terms of effort but in execution.
Miss the game last night? Maybe you want some thoughts to clear up the madness? Charlie Widdoes breaks down the Clippers most recent humbling loss to the Nets.
On January 27, 2010, the 3-40 Nets beat the Clippers to improve to 4-40. It was
one of 12 wins for a team that spent most of the year being compared to some of
the worst teams in the history of the league. Fast forward to this season and its the
Clippers with the obscenely low win total, struggling to translate significant promise
and hard work into one victory at a time to avoid a place in the history books for the
wrong reason.