On the waterfront with Blake Griffin: His future with the Los Angeles Clippers

Chris Paul fired away. DeAndre Jordan rebounded. Paul Pierce said goodbye. J.J. Redick turned invisible. Jamal Crawford scored. Blake Griffin was not in the building. Lob City is not in ruins. There is no fire to put out. Game 7 against the visiting Utah Jazz wasn’t close enough for all that. There is only quiet and mostly forgone conclusions. The mission failed.

Maybe it turned on Blake Griffin’s big toe. Maybe it didn’t. The Jazz, after all, did find a way to survive Rudy Gobert’s absence for three games in the series. They are moving on, and each in his own way, so might all these Los Angeles Clippers be moving on from a locker room held together by Noir cynicism and a hostage situation.

Locked in a seven-game series with the up-and-coming Jazz, the discussions orbiting Los Angeles were mostly about the Clippers’ looming demise off the court as opposed to the depth and athleticism of their younger counterparts. In large part, these radio transmissions emanated from the black hole that was once Blake Griffin. It is April. It is the Playoffs. Griffin, as he has been before, was hurt. T. S. Eliot penned many wasted lines on such matters. You know, all that nonsense about “Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain.”

Blake Griffin was supposed to be different. He was supposed to end all the winters of Clipper discontent. And, to a large degree, he has succeeded in that: for “April is now the cruelest month” on the Clippers’ calendar.

Prior to Griffin’s arrival, the franchise had four playoff appearances to its name since moving from San Diego in 1984. But, since the Clippers drafted Griffin in 2010, they have averaged 49.29 wins per season. The number of average wins per season rises even higher if one excludes Griffin’s rookie year, when the team managed only 32 wins. That first season is also the only one in his seven years that the team did not qualify for the playoffs. His career averages are 21.5 points per game, 9.4 rebounds per game, and 4.1 assists per game. His highlights in that span are infinite. He has been, with the exception of Chris Paul, perhaps the greatest Clipper ever, and before his arrival, such a phrase in reference to anyone in a Clipper uniform could have passed as an oxymoron.

The Elton Brand years saw only one playoff appearance. A couple seasons later, his Achilles ruptured. The ’97 squad, coached by Bill Fitch, was not built to last. The Larry Brown teams, led by Danny Manning and Ron Harper, managed two playoff appearances in the early ‘90s, topping out with 45 wins one year and a first round loss to the Utah Jazz. The Bill Walton years were time wasted at a concert in line for a Porta Potty. The Los Angeles Clippers have a long standing tradition of drawing people’s attention towards the most depressing of sports topics: the human body’s frailty.

While keeping tabs on his teammates yesterday, Griffin most likely did not recall the names and careers of all those other injured Clippers, and I doubt, as he saw a specialist on the east coast, the names Shaun Livingston, Marques Johnson, Norm Nixon, or Derek Smith were on the tip of his tongue either. Even if Griffin had been at the Staples Center yesterday, the possibility exists that during those long television timeouts his mind would have wandered elsewhere, to other players in other cities.

Moreover, considering all the time he spent wearing a suit this series, Griffin’s mind may have already cataloged all those other uniforms he could be wearing, even as The Ringer’s Kevin O’Connor cataloged all the power forward’s bumps, scrapes, and bruises that might dwindle some of those options:

"“First, to his left leg: sprained MCL, broken kneecap, meniscus tear, partially torn quadriceps, high ankle sprain, knee bone bruise, sprained knee, and strained hamstring. As for his right: He suffered torn cartilage in his right knee in college and underwent ‘minor’ surgery on his right knee this season to remove ‘loose bodies.’ Over the years he’s suffered other miscellaneous injuries, like a back stress fracture, right-elbow staph infection, and broken right hand. We can now add bruised big right toe to the list.”"

Before labeling Griffin as “The Six Million Dollar Man” and sardonically touting how, “We can rebuild him. We have the technology,” it might be important to remember that none of these injuries have decimated Griffin’s athleticism in total. While he may be suffering a war of attrition, his production has yet to collapse in dramatic fashion. And this ability to sustain the storm is what has differentiated Griffin in large part from his current franchise’s predecessors.

The bodies of past would-be-Clipper-greats snapped in spectacular moments of crisis, where the destruction of singular body parts signified entire role reversals. Danny Manning’s name still translates to “never the same,” and the same could be said of Ron Harper, and yet both those individuals managed to escape Hollywood’s hard boiled franchise. Harper would stand in Michael Jordan’s shadow. And Manning burned through his talent for a decade after leaving Los Angeles (and eventually found a home in the coaching ranks).

Blake Griffin hasn’t suffered a devastating injury that is akin to mountain top removal, and neither has he eroded in quite the same manner as Bill Walton. He isn’t wobbling through the league on fractured stilts, ready to surrender his legacy to mascot status. He is still a special talent. However, those alternative futures are not entirely remote either.

In four of his seven seasons, Griffin has played in less than 70 games. He also has a tendency to suffer injuries during the most important stretch of the season, the playoffs. Timing is important when teammates summon alley-oops out of thin air, but it is also plays a role in searching for scapegoats.

The Clippers have run aground and someone needs to carry the blame. All the key participants are ripe for the picking. Doc Rivers lacks imagination and cannot think outside the family bloodlines. DeAndre Jordan, while incredibly athletic, is also something of a relic. Chris Paul is too driven, born and molded for a different, more bloodthirsty age. Blake Griffin’s body is too fragile. To some extent, all these are true, but if Lob City ever existed at all, it existed on the cornerstone of Blake’s body.

There could be no discussion about the Clippers’ demise in a plural sense if the Clippers were not bound together in the flesh of Griffin’s leaping ability. He made good on Chris Paul’s vision. He gave Doc Rivers a reason. He reached out where DeAndre Jordan proved too limited. All of what Lob City could be as a potential Camelot hinged on Blake Griffin’s growth and development.

Whenever the old wood of Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan’s Western Conference forest gave way to fire and rot, Blake Griffin was to rise and fill the void. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the Golden State Warriors changed the map and Blake Griffin became trade bait (even as he stretched his range and compiled more assists).

And this would all make Griffin a sympathetic figure, except that the dude who has been punked multiple times by Zach Randolph broke his hand fighting with the team equipment manager. Add to those unfortunate circumstances rumors of locker room pouting and no journeys past the second round and one of the league’s most marketable players quickly transformed himself into an insurance hazard.

If Blake Griffin is a martyr for the cause, he may just as easily be the bully who couldn’t carry his own weight, and thus, his body is both the knot and the fraying.

And, admittedly, this narrative may not be fair to Blake Griffin. But the telling of it is definitely aided by a two-season All-Star drought in which what first appeared indestructible is now teetering on the brink of shrinking expectations. He is not currently leaping over cars, and the notion of a Griffin Force now sounds somewhat satirical. But he was at one point in time a superhero who was viewed as more funny than surly.

Then again, even Griffin is familiar with this story already. His last year at Oklahoma University his team lost to the University of North Carolina in the NCAA tournament’s Elite Eight. Griffin played like Thor during two halves of Ragnarok. His Sooners were doomed, but he was clearly the best warrior on the floor. His high-flying feats and relentless effort on the boards gave Tyler Hansbrough a preview of the NBA to come. But the Tar Heels advanced to the Final Four and became national champions. Blake Griffin moved on, was drafted number one, jumped over a KIA, and entered the Zone. That could be written as perseverance, but it could also be so simple as having talent.

His ability to move on so quickly in his youth was obviously tied to his leaping ability and the draw of stardom. In his third act as a public figure, his leaping ability will continue to dissipate, as it does for all athletes. He also will never be as large of a star as he was upon his arrival in California which means wherever he ends up, even if he returns to the Clippers, something other than highlights and paydays will have to drive him.

In another article for The Ringer, Kevin O’Connor draws parallels between the potential arc of Blake Griffin’s career and the path taken by Amar’e Stoudemire, after his high-flying days with the Seven Seconds or Less Suns. That route to waning afterthought is open to Griffin, but so are many others.

Kevin Love entered the league two seasons before Griffin, and there was a time when basketball observers debated which player was better and whose career would shine brightest. The Kevin Love that sparked such debates is no longer that Kevin Love, but he has moved on and had his best year as part of LeBron James’ supporting cast this season. In other words, there is life after stardom if a player can adjust his game. After all, both life and basketball offer ample opportunities for change.

Next: The different kinds of Russell Westbrook triple-doubles

If during this series you ever spotted Blake Griffin in a suit on the Clippers’ bench, he may have reminded you of Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. I do not mean that you specifically thought of Brando or that 1954 film, but that your eyes settled on a man of whom you once expected more. If so, then all those foam fingers, waving towels, and team t-shirts may have appeared to you as Venetian blinds draped in back of a car. And, if so, maybe you even caught the words, “I could have been a contender,” on the lips of this former hero. However, if you did bear witness to all this, then, like me, you should also keep in mind how this line doesn’t have to be Griffin’s epitaph. His movie — the one that unfolds before all of us — is far from over.

People love redemption stories. Blake Griffin just has to write one, and nothing is more important to a good story than the right setting.

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