After a 13-6 start to the season, the Clippers are now tied for first place in the West. Even if no one expects that to hold, sports media struggles to put the team in playoff conversations. Why is that?
“This is an extremely good team and no one’s talking about them! It’s insane!” Isaac Lee of The Ringer finally said the words on their November 20th Heat Check podcast, (50:17) after John Gonzalez and Jonathan Tjarks ran down the Western Conference without so much as a sideways mention of the LA Clippers.
#ClipperNation has been internally conflicted about the whole idea. Yes, the Clips absolutely deserve to be talked about, and such discussion is good for the brand and for the future of the team. It also helps with our free agency moves next offseason. On the flip side, as long as the league sleeps on the Clippers, we can continue our surprise run until it is almost too late for the other 29 teams to correct it.
But let’s set aside those considerations. A .600+ team deserves to be spoken about, and if after Christmas, the quarter-season marker, that team makes a realistically-achievable .700 win percentage from this point, even with excruciatingly stupid losses, they definitely deserve to be in the conversation.
So what’s the problem? Is it a historical Clippers bias? It’s hard to think, four years after professional horrible person Donald Sterling was ousted in lieu of widely-liked Steve Ballmer, that this feeling still exists. The fact that the Clippers live in the same city as the biggest celebrity catnip team in the world certainly affects their coverage, but to the point of being 13-6 and virtually unspoken about?
The reality is much more mundane. Gonzalez, in that same Heat Check podcast, showed it fairly plainly:
"I just sometimes forget about them because they’re better than the sum of their parts […] but I think part of what drives NBA content [is] narrative. There’s a little bit of that lacking with the Clippers. [51:34]"
Stars and superstars drive NBA content. While players like Tobias Harris, Montrezl Harrell and Lou Williams might be stars to us (though Harrell is starting to rightly gain attention), we probably won’t see any of them ending up on an All-Star team this season. In today’s NBA, young fans are more likely to follow talent than teams, as social media has become a major component of fandom. They aren’t Heat fans or Cavs fans or Lakers fans — they’re LeBron James fans. They’re Steph Curry fans.
It’s not like during the Lob City era that we were half as ignored as we are now. With Blake Griffin, Chris Paul and DeAndre Jordan, there was plenty of fodder for media to clamp their teeth onto. The Clippers were even a major part of how NBA Twitter blew up.
The point is, this Clippers team does not have the widely-known characters in their story. Our most widely-known and looked-for character today is Boban Marjanovic, the Demigod, who isn’t immune to DNP-CD games.
5th hardest.
— Hardwood Paroxysm (@HPbasketball) November 20, 2018
The Clippers are simultaneously really really really good and yet I have so little to say about them other than “they’re good." https://t.co/bl2VTpgXxd
The reality is that a team without a star will have to surprise twice as much for half the attention. It’s not enough to be first or tied for first in the West. 13-6 is not enough. 26-12 may not even be enough. There is a reason why Ballmer hired the well-respected Lee Jenkins from Sports Illustrated with the vaguely defined role of “Executive Director of Research & Identity.”
A major free agent like Kawhi Leonard or Kevin Durant would immediately put the spotlight on the Clippers, but Donald Sterling’s plantation-style of ownership was a quiet disrespect of the league, of people of color, and his own ex-team for decades. We’re now four years into a new front office, with a well-liked owner who’s throwing money everywhere to effectively build an NBA organization from scratch.
That’s not nearly long enough to undo a not-undeserved view of the LA Clippers as an also-ran team that lives in the shadow of the Lakers. Even after beating the Warriors, Bucks, Rockets (2x), Spurs, Grizzlies, and the Trail Blazers, the problems are not fixed in a single, probably-not-Finals-contention season. Listen, I’m optimistic, but I’m not crazy.
The Starters‘ Tas Melas on their November 27th show picked the LA Clippers as overvalued. “They’ll come back down to Earth a little bit. […] It’s gonna drop off a bit.” While I feel Melas is probably right, I can’t remember a single time this season where The Starters spoke about the Clippers for longer than ten seconds. Typically, you value a team before you overvalue them.
If we keep making tough games interesting, we might start seeing people wake up and actually provide some air time to discuss the team. While the tone of mentions has changed from “they’re not making the playoffs” to “they’re actually pretty good,” the depth of discussions goes no further than “Tobias Harris is good” and “Boban is big and fun.”
This reticence is not going to be fixed in a single season. But 13-6 is a good start.