INGLEWOOD, Calif. — The place was beautiful.
On Wednesday night, in the season opener, the Los Angeles Clippers debuted their new, gleaming, futuristic arena. No more sharing with the Los Angeles Lakers. No more banners above, covered or otherwise, celebrating someone else’s accomplishments. No more feeling like a second-class team whittling the time away in someone else’s building.
The other L.A. team had its own home now, and it was a sight to see.
All they were missing was a team worthy of it.
Take the way they lost, in overtime, to the Phoenix Suns, 116-113. The deciding play was a turnover while trying to inbound the ball with three seconds left, and the metaphor was spot on: A chance squandered, hope extinguished as quickly as it had emerged. It was the ugly exclamation point after coughing up a 10-point lead deep into the fourth quarter.
But even a single win would no more have camouflaged how this Clippers project has withered on the vine the past 12 months, any more than a fancy new arena will be able to do so.
This team has no plan to get to where it was already supposed to be, nor any hope that the Intuit Dome will for the next few years be anything more than a shiny reminder of what isn’t inside.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. For several years, as this team’s structure rose from the ground just a mile from the old Los Angeles Forum, a place that helped define and revolutionize the NBA during the Showtime Lakers era, the Clippers front office hatched a plan to fill it with a contender.
They would line up the stars, hire the coach, and give owner Steve Ballmer the kind of squad he craved to kick off this new era, their era, inside Ballmer’s $2 billion arena, his own personal ode to what a basketball experience should feel like.
Winning — real, sustained, they’re-a-contender winning — was always supposed to be part of that plan.
They’d convinced Kawhi Leonard, fresh off his championship one-and-done mercenary season in Toronto, to come home to L.A. Then they’d traded all those draft picks for Paul George, including, in that deal, sending a certain Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to the Oklahoma City Thunder.
When, a few years later, that hadn’t worked, they went all-in on James Harden, too, bringing him from Philadelphia. More picks and pick swaps went into the ether, the price to pay for a winner, now. Yes, the future might have been going out the door, but the near-present would include a well-timed competitor to mark the moment, yesterday’s moment, when this place would open and a Western Conference force would take up residence.
You know how this story ends: George is a Sixer. Leonard is again on his will-he-or-won’t-he-ever-play merry-go-round. SGA is a favorite to be this year’s Most Valuable Player, the focal point of a Thunder team that is likely the actual best in the Western Conference.
Oh, and OKC is loaded with many of the Clippers’ future picks, including next summer’s first-rounder, a suddenly alluring asset in the Cooper Flagg sweepstakes. More insult added to the injury of how that trade turned out.
There is no easy, sudden or sure fix, as our Sam Quinn excellently laid out last week.
In many ways, the Suns team that beat the Clippers Wednesday night is a better-looking reflection of L.A.’s own situation: Boasting an excellent coach, short on depth, short on future picks, with no easy fixes, all while being stuck between the championship expectations that blossomed in the beginning and the dull sense that the big and bold plans went awry.
But Phoenix’s ceiling is higher, sitting in the realm of being a top-six team this year and then — well, who knows? Maybe you get hot, talent wins out, good things happen. Even the Play-In for Phoenix feels like an absolute worst-case scenario. And that is, if nothing else, a shot, some skin in the game.
Their superstar and former Finals MVP, Kevin Durant, is actually healthy and playing. They have Devin Booker. Both are better than a banged-up Kawhi or an available James Harden, who needed 28 shots to score 29 points on Wednesday night and threw in eight turnovers for good measure. Maybe Bradley Beal is better. Maybe those three getting a real run together this year — plus the addition of Tyus Jones, a much-needed point guard, and new head coach Mike Budenholzer — works.
Phoenix has some pieces, some ceiling, some hope.
And what do the Clippers have? They have a new arena.
They certainly ushered the place in with some style. They introduced “The Wall” before the game, Ballmer’s rising row of seats behind one of the baskets meant to bring together and bond the manic Clippers fans he wants to see in his own image.
In fact, Ballmer did a manic dance and screamed “WELCOME HOME CLIPPER NATION!” into a microphone to kick things off. There were fireworks — inside the arena — during the national anthem. The place is slick and interesting, full of cool tech and a stunning big screen, with an outdoor area that feels part carnival, part tailgate, part celebration of the game.
The place is a marvel. A perfect place to catch a game for a night, Clippers fan or not.
It’s the team inside it that feels so incongruous here: A botched ambition, a failed plan, a mistake filling up a space designed to showcase something sensational.
By the end of the first quarter — when the Suns were still up 22-21 — the energy in the building had already vanished, quicker than the idea of Kawhi playing a 68-game season again, quicker than the Clippers’ hopes turned to dust when PG headed East.
It came back as they made their fourth-quarter charge, continued into overtime, and then sputtered and died to utter silence when Phoenix won after an ugly OT. Leaving Intuit, people seemed to know: The hope earlier had felt hollow. Not even their new, beautiful home will change that if this team is what we saw Wednesday night — and what most of us expect going forward.
Before the game, asked about this brand new arena, the Suns’ new coach waxed poetic for a while despite, he said, not having seen all of it yet. The place is impressive, and, on top of that, Coach Bud is a nice guy. He was happy to say nice things.
“Everything’s exciting,” Budenholzer finished. “Everything’s new.”
Well, not everything.
Because Clippers basketball remains stuck in the mire of mediocrity, irrelevance and a murky path forward.
That’s a tough basketball reality that even a gleaming new arena can’t obscure.
