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I’ll just get it out of the way.

Last season sucked.

I am truly sorry. What happened in Toronto was 100% my fault. I messed up.

There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it. And I don’t mean that in some clichéd “not a day goes by” way.

I genuinely think about it every single day, and I just feel like I let down the fans who have been riding with us since the beginning.

If I took one positive from last season, it’s that there were a lot of people who were obviously disappointed in me, and who told me so, but who were still in my corner. I’ll never forget what those people did for me during a time when I literally had to turn off my phone to get away from it all.

Being in the headlines in 2016 is … well, it’s interesting.

To this day, I’ll tweet out something like, “So good to be back home.”

And the first 10 replies are like, “Make sure you don’t punch anybody.”

Dang.

That’s fair, Twitter. Tough, but fair.

I don’t want to dwell on it, but I think I owe it to Clippers fans to say it once again before the season begins: I’m sorry.

With everything that’s happened over the last few months, you have no idea how excited I am to play basketball again. It’s crazy to think about, but this is going to be my eighth year as a Clipper. I’m really proud of how far we’ve come in that time.

When I was at my lowest point, a few days after the incident happened last season, I got a call from my older brother Taylor, who was over in Italy.

He didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear. He said to me straight up, “Man, what are you doing? This is not you. What are you doing this for?”

I was crushed.

It broke through all my walls. To hear that from him, somebody I’ve looked up to my whole life, who always tells me what I need to hear, that’s when I had a pretty big realization about who I am, and who I want to be.

I don’t want to say what that realization was. I just want to go out and show you.

Blake Griffin, The Players' Tribune

Blake wrote:It has been really cool to be part of a team that went from barely registering with people less than a decade ago to being one that people respect. We haven’t achieved our ultimate goal, but I hope we’ve changed the perception of the Clippers. At the very least, we’re worth hating now.

Blake wrote:That’s why I have ultimate respect for Clippers fans who have been there since the very beginning, who stuck with us through the surreal Sterling Era, and who stuck with us through our playoff disappointments, and who still have to deal with being surrounded by Lakers fans at school or at work.

We all know the narrative going into this season. Everyone’s like, “Oh, they lose in the playoffs every year. Same old Clippers.”

All I have to say to that is this: We’re the same core group that beat the defending-champion Spurs in seven games just 17 months ago. I know 17 months seems like forever, especially in NBA time, but we know how small the margins are between winning and losing, and how quickly the narratives around teams can change.