Has the worst passed for Clippers coach Mike Dunleavy?
You can never tell with Clippers owner Donald Sterling.
In a rare interview with the Los Angeles Times' T.J. Simers this week, Sterling said that Dunleavy "deserves the chance to win with healthy players" but also insisted that "how much we're paying him is no consideration" if he decides he wants to make an immediate change. The prevailing leaguewide wisdom held that the fact that Dunleavy is due to make $5 million next season as well as this season would save him no matter what, but Sterling claims that the ability to pay out a fired coach over a five-to-15-year period renders the issue immaterial.
The best info we have, as conveyed by one source close to the situation, is that Sterling issued a win-or-else ultimatum before the Clippers' home date with Minnesota on Nov. 2 after an 0-4 start. Whether Sterling actually would have gone through with a firing so early had the Clippers lost that game … we'll probably never know now because L.A. managed to pull out a 93-90 victory with a lineup pretty close to full strength.
The Clips lost three straight home games in distressing fashion shortly thereafter to New Orleans (before Byron Scott was ousted), Oklahoma City and Toronto (blowing a 22-point lead), raising the volume on the rising fan discontent in Clipperland. But a big home win over Denver on Friday on ESPN, after beating the Thunder on Oklahoma City's floor, would appear to have eased some pressure on Dunleavy.
Some stuff about Kaman and DJ.
"Kaman might be as close to ambidextrous as we've got in this league. It's more normal for smaller guys to be good with both hands. For big guys, it's rare."
Mavericks forward Dirk Nowitzki, when asked to choose between two of his closest friends in the league -- Chris Kaman of the Clippers and Suns guard Steve Nash -- for the mythical title of Most Ambidextrous Player in the NBA.
The subject came up as a postscript to the All-Lefty Team unveiled in last week's Weekend Dime. We received some interesting responses from readers, friends and folks around the league, including requests to (A) name Phil Jackson as coach of the lefties, (B) remind folks that Dwight Howard was a natural lefty as a youngster until an injury forced him to switch hands and (C) select President Obama as an honorary member of the squad because he's surely the most famous lefty baller in the world.
There were also calls for Kaman and Nash to be added because both are such standout two-handed players, but our best compromise was trying to pinpoint the game's No. 1 ambidextrous player. Having played with Nash in Dallas and Kaman on the German national team, Nowitzki was naturally called in to break the tie … although New York's David Lee deserves an All-Ambidextrous mention as well.
P.S. -- We deeply, deeply regret that Clippers center DeAndre Jordan was omitted from our original All-Lefty list. As explained last week, there is no official NBA list in circulation because "handedness" is not something the league records like they do in baseball or hockey, so our compiling was done from scratch in consultation with all the teams. Fixing our error and adding Jordan now brings us to 31 lefties in a 431-player league as of Friday morning, which computes to 7.2 percent of the NBA population.
P.P.S. -- We pass this along in the interest of being as thorough as possible: Nash actually makes you think he's left-footed on a soccer field because he uses that leg for passing and dribbling even more than he uses his left hand on the basketball floor.
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Looks like nothing will happen on the Dunleavy front...
