Quake Griffin wrote:Wammy Giveaway wrote:Quake Griffin wrote:Clipper fans deserve a championship.esqtvd wrote:Cubbie fans waited 108 years. Ranma, etc., need to wait at least twice that. They deserve nothing. And they shall receive it...in abundance!
Why do the Clippers deserve a championship? I'm not talking about the fans here, just the team.
Not sure why you'd ask that if I never said that.
Hopefully that was aimed towards esqtvd. I intend to not get in the mud with his Ranma bashing.
Ranma's a good Clipper fan and an excellent contributor to this board.
Actually, the question was aimed to both of you.
You said that the fans deserve a title. After all the losing seasons they've been through, never becoming relevant until former commissioner David Stern stepped in with the infamous Lakers veto, that claim is warranted. My concern is with the team itself.
Originally in that same post, I was to go into a rant about the Lakers silver-platter Midas-touch lady-luck ways, and its psychological effect on the Clippers franchise. They're jealous of the Lakers. When they came to L.A. under the evil Sterling regime, he hoped that the same things the Lakers experienced would work for his own franchise as well. There are a lot of things working against that:
1. The Clippers were a swap of the Boston Celtics, the Laker's arch nemesis. This makes the Clippers the Laker's natural enemy.
2. Donald Sterling helped Dr. Jerry Buss in purchasing the Lakers. This makes Sterling a Laker spy. He can stab the Clippers in the back and not even know it, because he never cared, because Jerry would take care of everything. The Lakers were once the golden child of the league.
But that's only part of the problem. Excluding the Sterling regime as we're seeing with the Danilo Gallinari punching incident, this team as a whole has no direction, no leadership, no backbone. Every win and loss is taken personally. They seemed more concerned about getting into the good graces of L.A. and usurping the Lakers instead of doing what every team is supposed to be doing: constructing teams in an unbiased basketball sense that is congruent to fighting for a championship. Every team is doing this, from the dynastic competitors like the Golden State Warriors; counter-competitors like the San Antonio Spurs, Cleveland Cavaliers, and now the Houston Rockets. Even the lottery teams like the Atlanta Hawks and Sacramento Kings are looking at the bigger picture and using the draft to pluck out players who are either future franchise cornerstones or have amazing talent that can spearhead a winning culture. The Clippers seem more concerned about being loved by any means necessary; complaining about basketball injustice at the risk of getting ejected, fined or suspended; protecting their closest friends or family members from any sort of scrutiny all because of their security blanket morality pet status.
The Clippers are this close to resurrecting the Malice At The Palace. I fear that the Clippers will do something so heinous that commissioner Adam Silver will recommend taking a season away from them... even if their hearts were in the right place.
In regards to Ranma, he's a good companion and supporter. He wants to see some decency in the franchise just like I do. My methods range from tough love to vehement disassociation ("You're no longer a part of the family" as an example quote). I know that Ranma will disagree to a majority, if not all, of my post, but bashing a fellow debater is unacceptable. We have our differences, but I know he's a good person.
And a good Ranma ½ fan.
