The Clippers can be (almost) as attractive as the Lakers

It’s hard to know the end of things. Acceptance is only one half of the quandary. The present, replete with murky details, makes it hard to discern the difference between the closing chapter and the rut before the breakthrough. Narrative structure is best understood in hindsight.

Sometimes the signs will hit you harder than a bookend. Chris Paul will leave you. Organizational shake-ups will take place. It will take a five-year commitment and $173 million in order to retain your other franchise star, Blake Griffin. In order to top out as a first-round out in a tough Western Conference, you’ll be flirting with the luxury cap. By the way, DeAndre Jordan’s impending free agency is looming. Your team will be injury-prone and their value will depreciate.

That’s the position the Clippers were in this summer, and they were so passionate about achieving it that they simulated Blake Griffin’s retirement ceremony, playing on the 28-year-old’s affections. Griffin proceeded to cancel his meetings with other franchises, and re-upped with the Clippers.

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Which is why it came as a relative shock when the Clippers agreed to trade Griffin to the Detroit Pistons in exchange for Avery Bradley, Tobias Harris, a first-round draft pick and a second-round draft pick. The fact that they offloaded one of the diciest contracts in the league and attained assets in return is remarkable. Instead of operating with the attitude of a small market that would feel grateful to field any high-level star, they took advantage of those yearnings in their trade partner.

For all the internal justifications the Clippers had to re-sign Griffin, this much was always clear: Griffin, on a five-year maximum contract, meant more to the Clippers than he could to any other team. There was, in Clipperland, a pervasive sense that even if Griffin ate up a ton of cap space, it wasn’t going to be better spent anywhere else. They’re the Clippers, after all. The only way to wrangle top-level talent would be to draft it, and maybe the only way to retain it would be to channel nostalgia.

There is, however, a world of difference between the Clippers of yesterday — the cursed Clippers, the Donald Sterling-owned Clippers — and today’s Clippers. They may not have the mystique and the history of the Los Angeles Lakers, who are currently hoarding cap space to make a run at top free agents, but in this particular moment in time — the relevant moment, that is — they share a great deal of similarities.

They both play in Los Angeles, at the Staples Center, although the Clippers are are breaking ground on a new arena, set to open in Inglewood, fully funded by the coffers of owner Steve Ballmer, who is a far cry from the penny-wise, pound-foolish (not to mention regressive and racist) former owner Sterling.

The Lakers have the ear of Magic Johnson, a former Laker who wants to lead the franchise to its former glory. The Clippers have the ear of Jerry West, a former Laker who has led the franchise to glory. He then advised the Warriors not to trade Klay Thompson for Kevin Love. While the decision-making structure on both teams is complicated enough that things aren’t merely that simple, the point is this: if you’re going to argue that the difference between the Lakers and the Clippers is tradition or merely a higher level of competence, you have to acknowledge that a key player in garnering the Lakers’ success is now on the Clippers. They may perpetually play little brother, but at this point, the Clippers even have a piece of the Lakers’ mystique.

The Lakers, with more promising young players in Lonzo Ball, Brandon Ingram and Kyle Kuzma, are still a more attractive free agent destination, especially for a timeline tied to LeBron James. But if the Clippers can parlay DeAndre Jordan, Lou Williams and even Avery Bradley into more draft picks or young players, they won’t be too far behind in the long-term. Besides, if the Lakers win the LeBron sweepstakes and amass a large luxury tax bill, somebody has to scare the hell out of small market teams with stars that might have a wandering eye.

When Griffin originally re-signed with the Clippers, I wrote about the franchise’s inferiority complex in detail, as well as the special relationship between the Clippers, Griffin, and their fanbase. Trading Griffin is a sign that the Clippers are ready to move forward and brandish their identity as a viable free agent powerhouse, but one wonders, what changed in the course of six months?

The obvious answer is the assets the Clippers got in return for Griffin. Mapping out a path to relevancy would have been a lot tougher if Griffin had simply walked, leaving the Clippers with nothing. And while their front office had to know there would be some interest in Griffin in the trade market, I can’t imagine they thought they could swing this kind of deal. If they did, the free agency pitch meeting that is now being called Machievallen on some corners of the internet becomes doubly so.

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Maybe they had a come-to-Jesus moment when their attendance dropped over 2,000 seats from last season, putting them at 20th overall in the NBA. The idea behind bringing the band back again, after all, was a desperate gasp at relevancy.

Whatever it was, the Clippers are finally bridging the gap between who they are and who they could be. They finally broke up with their high school girlfriend, and they find out what’s out there. There’s always a possibility that they’ll fall flat on their faces, but if they never let go of Griffin, they’d never know what the cachet he built up in his eight years as the face of the franchise was truly worth. We’re about to find out.