The twists and turns just don’t stop. On March 09, 2010 the Los Angeles Clippers announced that they had “severed ties” with General Manager and former head coach Mike Dunleavy Sr and named assistant GM Neil Olshey to take his place.
I have to be honest with you all when I say this, I didn’t see this announcement coming, not this soon. Sure, I know it must sound like B.S. since Dunleavy was removed as coach earlier this season, but I’m being sincere.
You see, the Clippers are owned by a man named Donald Sterling, who is infamous around the world for housing discrimination lawsuits being a “thrifty” owner with very little interest in building a winner, making sound basketball management decisions, caring about anything else but his bottom line … well you get the picture.
It’s been a common sentiment around the NBA (and within Clipper Nation) that Sterling doesn’t care about the fans of his franchise or his team’s success. He’s never been a favorite of Clips fans or most NBA followers and it’s for good reasons. The Clippers are notorious for being one of the most maligned, long-suffering teams in professional sports. We’re the butt of every joke, the regularly criticized and almost universally degraded “little brothers” of the NBA in Los Angeles. Earning that type of reputation is not easy and it involves systematic failures over long periods of time with little to no room for a brighter tomorrow.
And under Sterling’s watch, that’s exactly what’s happened. Coach after coach has failed, drafts have been thrown away with awful selections, NBA legends have left on bad terms, made claims of racial discrimination and countless other mishaps. A column by Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski published today has a harshly-worded summary of just some of Sterling’s errors.
For those of us who foolishly felt optimism for the future during the short Lamar Odom, Darius Miles, Elton Brand and Quentin Richardson “era”, the public face of every Clipper misstep since then was a man chosen by Sterling himself – Mike Dunleavy.
Just a few of the many Dunleavy faces that tormented Clippers fans the past 7 years.
(Diary of a Clippers Fan/YouBeenBlinded Illustration)
Knocking Dunleavy has practically been a rite of passage for Clipper fans and if we’re being honest, most of it was well-deserved. His coaching decisions, rotations and substitution patterns literally doomed away our best shot at ever winning anything back in 2006.
Legend has it that Raja Bell still sends Dunleavy and Daniel Ewing flowers out of gratitude for allowing him to end the Clippers most successful year with his 3-pointer over Ewing in the playoffs, who was a rookie at the time.
He had a coaching record with the team (215-325 in 6 1/2 seasons) that would have earned any other coach a pink slip years ago. Ask Byron Scott and Avery Johnson, who had far better records, about how fast a coaching change usually happens. Aside from just wins and losses, Dunleavy also chose a guy like Yaroslav Korolev with the 12th pick in the 2005 draft, ahead of no-name stiffs like Danny Granger, Nate Robinson and David Lee.
I’ve bashed Dunleavy just as much as most others, whether by yelling at the TV or looking down at the team bench from the stands and muttering curse words to myself mixed in with shots at “The Dunce” or “Dumbleavy.”
Heck, I even called it “a glorious days in Clipper history” when his firing was announced back in February. I say all that because although I felt happy to know he was finally gone, it was a bittersweet moment, precisely because of how long it took to fire him.
And the blame for that gross mismanagement falls directly onto Sterling. He always seemed to be the last one to notice that Dunleavy deserved to be fired, giving him chance after chance to keep falling on his face. To add insult to injury, when the time finally did come to fire him, he didn’t even know how to do that the right way. According to an article by Ramona Shelbourne of ESPNLosAngeles.com, “Dunleavy still doesn’t know exactly what happened.”
“I come back to my locker around 7 p.m. and there’s a million messages on my phone,” Dunleavy told her. “This guy comes up to me and said, ‘What’s going on? They just said on TV that the Clippers severed ties with you?’ I had no idea what they were talking about. I’m like, ‘Wow. I haven’t even talked to the Clippers.’”
Surprised? Baron Davis wasn’t. Just another day of business for Sterling. Yeah Dunleavy’s gone, but the boogeyman still lurks over the Clippers. Kelly Dwyer over at Ball Dont Lie sums up how I feel with these few sentences below, taken from his article on the firing.
“The Clippers? They’re a bunch of (curse word)s. They kicked this guy to the curb just as he leaves them what will be a little under $17 million in cap room once the team’s cap holds and draft picks are sussed out. Did Dunleavy deserve to be sent home, in both positions, long ago? Sure. But only a team like the Clippers could turn this guy into anything somewhat slightly resembling a sympathetic figure.”
He’s right. So just like all the other times being a Clips fan has ruined some dream of mine, here I sit just a day after seeing Dunleavy disappear from Los Angeles feeling unfullfilled and cheated. Like a sucker who had tickets to a show they were waiting years to see only to arrive and find out it was all a scam. I thought I’d be happier today, thought that I’d be excited about next season and the opportunity for a new coach, a new GM and a big name free agent.
While some look at the firing as a possible “mission statement” to usher in a new era, I’m not buying it.
Instead, I’m sitting here stuck with the unwanted knowledge that Donald Sterling remains as the owner of my favorite team. Yup, even without Dunleavy, they’re still the Clippers after all.
-Will.
“Diary of a Clippers Fan” will be published Mondays and Thursdays during the regular season.
