From Marc J. Spears at Yahoo! Sports:

“The Los Angeles Clippers have brought back former interim coach Kim Hughes to work for the franchise a week after firing him, an NBA source told Yahoo! Sports.

The Clippers announced April 17 that Hughes was relieved of his duties as coach and that the franchise was beginning its search for a replacement. This week, the Clippers asked Hughes to return to help with the draft and take part in player development. Hughes was back working out players in the team’s practice facility Wednesday. He remains under contract through June 30, but has yet to sign a new deal.  More...

It’s safe to say that Kim Hughes isn’t the coach to lead the Clippers into the future. While there’s very little evidence that he’ll ever be a transformative figure as an NBA coach, he’s incredibly honest and likable. With regard to temperament and candor, he’s the coach you always hoped you’d cover if you were ever on a beat.

From my post at TrueHoop:  More...

From the Clippers’ release:

The Los Angeles Clippers today relieved Kim Hughes of his duties as interim head coach. The remaining members of the team’s coaching staff will remain in their current roles at this time.

“We appreciate Kim’s contributions during his time here especially over the last two and a half months,” stated Clippers’ President Andy Roeser. “But we also know that our responsibility is to do what is in the organization’s immediate best interests for its ability to move forward. This season was an overall disappointment and certainly fell short of both our expectations and what should rightly have been anticipated by our fans. We will move deliberately and productively to regain the successful competitive position we had all hoped for when this past season began.”  More...

Note: The original publication of this post incorrectly listed the score of the game Dallas 109, Clippers 80.

Dallas isn’t a team that’s predisposed to running — they rank only 17th in pace. But the Mavericks can identify free points when they see them, and with the Clippers’ season only 51 hours from the final buzzer, the opportunities are plentiful against a team missing three-fifths of its starting lineup.

Shawn Marion leaks out at every opportunity (1st, 9:04; 1st, 8:35) and rookie Roddy Beaubois runs a clinic, knifing through what can’t in good conscience be called the Clippers’ transition defense. Such an appellation would be insult to the legacies of Cuttino Mobley, Elton Brand, Corey Maggette and Quenton Ross. In a 56-second span, Jason Kidd hits Beaubois for two easy, but glorious alley-oops that display all 40 inches of Beaubois’ vertical leap (1st, 7:21; 1st, 6:25). A few minutes later, Beaubois splits two defenders on the break to finish at the rim yet again (1st, 3:44) … and the foul.

“Our wings struggled getting back containing dribble penetration,” Hughes says in the postgame press conference. “Our philosophy was not to go to the offensive boards, but sometimes that memo didn’t get across. We had three men going to the offensive boards — maybe looking for points, I hope not — but then not getting back on defense.”

Dirk Nowitzki remains one of the truly undefendable forces in the game. To the extent he can be bothered, DeAndre Jordan doesn’t display the focus to get the job done. Throughout the first quarter — when Nowitzki logs 11 points on 5-for-6 shooting, 5 rebounds in nine minutes — Jordan affords Nowitzki far too much space for his fall-away jumper. It’s a difficult matchup for Jordan, because Nowitzki can toy with defenders at the high post and Jordan still isn’t comfortable in the hinterland away from the basket.

The Clippers cough up 37 points in 26 possessions (142.3/100) in the first quarter, maintaining their position as the League’s worst defensive team over the past eight weeks. They tally 20 points in the paint — precious few of them of the traditional, back-to-the-basket ilk. These are easy buckets generated over a disinterested Clippers’ defense by a Dallas team led by a floor general in Kidd who can detect space and movement with the precision of motion capture technology. The Clippers’ dispirited personnel simply has no chance.

By the third quarter, the Clippers are visibly dejected. Steve Blake’s gesture of solidarity — a reach for his teammate hand with an extended arm — goes unreturned. Lawler’s Law is invoked in the first thirty seconds of the fourth quarter when the Mavericks top 100 on a couple of J.J. Barea free throws.

As any responsible public safety official would tell you at the scene of a disaster, I urge you to keep moving.

There’s nothing to see here.

For the past twenty one years, Clippers games in Salt Lake City have come to resemble traditional Japanese Kabuki theater.  Fans would enter the venue, secured in the knowledge of the storyline and how it will end.  There are no surprises and no suspense, the joy of spectacle lies in small deviations; how the Jazz might prevail on this night and by how much.  The players in their respective jerseys might have changed over the course of two decades, but there is a comforting rhythm to the almost unbroken string of Clippers losses in Utah, as predictable as the tides and the turning of the earth.  When the Clippers finally pulled out their lone victory in twenty one years, on January 22, 2003, the world did not come to a cataclysmic end as the ancient Mayans had prophesized, though perhaps the world did hold its breath for a brief moment to ponder this inexplicable outcome, which had defied all known laws of physics, before exhaling and settling back into its comforting axis of rotation, from which the unbroken streak of Clippers losses would continue on as before.  More...