The Last Days of Lob City? Inside the Clippers’ Latest Playoff Demise

It’s nearing 10:30 p.m. on April 17, a pleasant spring evening in downtown Los Angeles, and the locker room that houses the Clippers basketball team looks like a daycare center.

Seven boys, their ages ranging from two to 10, are pinging around the room—chirping, hooting, clambering in and out of locker stalls and rolling chairs, bouncing a stray ball until it skitters away.

Soon the giggling gaggle is drawn to the middle stall, where Austin Rivers, the Pied Piper of Clipperdom, welcomes them with smiles and high-fives. Rivers, a 23-year-old backup guard, opens his wallet and sends each sprightly face away with a crisp dollar bill.

A few feet away, 10-year-old Emmet O’Connor, the son of assistant coach Brendan O’Connor, belts out a familiar lyric—”Droppin’ dimes! Droppin’ dimes!”—the signature line from a TV commercial featuring Clippers star Chris Paul and the Portland Trail Blazers’ Damian Lillard, who happens to be in the visiting locker room, down the hall.

The Clippers have just rolled to a 115-95 victory over the Blazers to open the playoffs. And in Clipperdom, home victories mean one thing: The kids get to visit the locker room.

It’s a Doc Rivers tradition. First they visit his office, a parade of mini-Pauls and Griffins and Prigionis, each greeting him with a “Hey, Coach!” Then they file into the locker room.

“It’s really like a family,” veteran guard Jamal Crawford, who has two boys, would say later. “The most family atmosphere I’ve been around.”

As Rivers will later explain, “We just try to douse our guys with love.”

In this moment, on this mid-April night, the Clippers are a portrait of joyful harmony.

The broken hand that would end Paul’s season is still nine days away. The grim diagnosis on star forward Blake Griffin—aggravated quad, out for the playoffs—is 10 days away. And the 106-103 loss in Game 6 that would serve as the Clippers’ death knell is still 12 days away.

The end will be sudden and grisly, packed with pain and anguish and renewed doubts about the Clippers’ resolve, indeed their entire future.

A nagging question looms: Are these the last days of Lob City?

A breakup of the Paul-Griffin-DeAndre Jordan core seems more likely than ever—not inevitable, but no longer inconceivable. It’s on the table, and everyone knows it. The Clippers, once the NBA’s most dazzling team, all fast breaks and soaring alley-oops, have stalled out.

Dazzling, but not as deep as the Golden State Warriors.

Potent, but not as polished as the San Antonio Spurs.

Every playoff run in the Paul-Griffin era has ended in ignominy—blown leads, fumbled possessions, frayed nerves—without even a sniff of the conference finals.

Six months ago, Rivers openly wondered if his team was growing stale. Another early exit—even with the caveats of injury and misfortune—only seems to affirm those fears.

Yet in this moment, on this mid-April night, optimism reigns.

Griffin has returned from the quad injury that sidelined him for most of the season, and he looks better than anyone expected—exploding, soaring and dunking all over Portland’s Mason Plumlee in Game 1.

J.J. Redick’s bruised heel is a concern, but he just dropped 17 points on 8-of-12 shooting. Jordan looks fearsome—his ghastly free throws notwithstanding—and Paul looks as steady as ever.

The Clippers just throttled the Blazers’ potent backcourt, and there is every reason to believe they will cruise to the second round, for a rematch with the mighty Warriors.

No one outside this joyous locker room would give the Clippers a chance against the Warriors. But they might make it interesting. (And who knows, maybe Stephen Curry will twist an ankle or a knee along the way?)

The Clippers—perennial contender, perennial disappointment—are in this fleeting moment still in the conversation. They believe.

If you hang around long enough, you start to understand it. Bleacher Report tagged along for 12 days, from just before the Clippers’ playoff opener in L.A. through their painful Game 4 in Portland.

It’s 10:05 a.m. on April 18 at the Starbucks down the road from the Clippers’ training center, and Crawford—known to the barista as “Jay”—is sipping a hot chocolate (he doesn’t drink coffee) and ruminating on playoff collapses.

There was 2013, when the Clippers went up 2-0 on the Memphis Grizzlies in the first round, then lost the next four games.

There was 2014, when the Clippers, tied 2-2 with Oklahoma City in the conference semis, blew a seven-point lead in the final 45 seconds of Game 5, leading to their ouster in Game 6.

And there was, most infamously, 2015, when the Clippers held a 3-1 lead over Houston in the conference semis and lost their next three games—blowing a 19-point lead in the final 14:15 of Game 6.

“The last three years have been, like, so dramatic,” Crawford says. “It’s like, we have to graduate now.”

The next day, the 36-year-old Crawford will win the Sixth Man of the Year Award, his third. Reliably candid and amiable, Crawford was also honored by the L.A. beat writers for being consistently great with the media.

Crawford habitually starts sentences with the word “honestly,” and it never fails to sound earnest. He’s also an irrepressible optimist, which, when you think about it, is the most critical trait for a volume scorer. The basket is always half-full. The next shot is always going down.

Those playoff collapses, when stacked together, seem damning, painting the portrait of a Clippers team that buckles under pressure. But there’s a context to each defeat, as Crawford is quick to point out.

That 2013 loss to Memphis? Griffin badly sprained his ankle on the eve of Game 5, leaving him gimpy the rest of the series. He played 34 minutes over the final two games.

That 2014 collapse against Oklahoma? It came two weeks after the revelation of racist statements by team owner Donald Sterling—an incident that rocked the franchise and left everyone emotionally drained.

And last year? Well, the Clippers are still trying to explain last year. They know they should have beaten the Rockets, regardless of circumstances. But about those circumstances: Paul missed the first two games of the series after injuring his hamstring in the first round. And the Clippers, lacking much depth, were simply exhausted from that seven-game fight.

So while fans and pundits see a fragile team, Crawford insists, “I don’t think that doubt ever crept in.”

And while outsiders see a talented team that simply can’t hang with the big boys, Crawford gently notes, “The last two champions…we put both of them out of the playoffs the last two years.”

Indeed, the Clippers not only ousted the defending champion Spurs last year, in a dramatic Game 7 victory, but they’re also the last team to have taken a series from the Warriors—in the first round in 2014.

“So we’re not that far away,” Crawford says. “We feel like we can play with anybody.”

That first-round takedown of San Antonio should probably get more notice than it does in this discussion of Clippers playoff fortitude and Clippers psychoanalysis and Clippers resilience.

So should this fact: The Clippers went 30-15 while Griffin—their leading scorer and second-best playmaker—recovered from a partially torn quadriceps. They finished with 53 wins, the sixth-best mark in the league, and might have gone for 60 had Griffin never gone down.

However the season ends, Crawford understands it will be remembered for a different Griffin narrative: The one in which Griffin punched Matias Testi, an assistant equipment manager, after a late-night argument at a Toronto restaurant. The punch resulted in a broken hand, a four-game suspension and endless humiliation for everyone involved.

The incident only underscored all of the worst perceptions of the Clippers: That they are immature, combustible, unreliable. That their chemistry is suspect.

If anyone knows poor chemistry and controversy, it’s Crawford. He started his career in Chicago, in the woeful post-Michael Jordan era; played four-plus years in New York, at the height of the Stephon Marbury-Isiah Thomas psychodrama; and spent one ill-fated season in Portland, the year the team turned on coach Nate McMillan.

“I’ve had some doozies,” he says.

Whatever the Clippers are, they are not that. By all accounts and appearances, the Clippers long ago put the Griffin incident behind them, framing it (as benignly as possible) as a family squabble. Testi is still working for the Clippers, still friends with Griffin. If there is any lingering resentment here, it’s hard to detect.

“It’s really like a family,” Crawford …

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