
These have been the three best years in the history of the Los Angeles Clippers franchise by any metric and, when you include their highly publicized Sterling-ectomy in 2014, subjective analysis.
And yet losing Chris Paul and Blake Griffin in the same game, quite possibly for the rest of the postseason, within one calendar day of the Golden State Warriors losing their best player for a mere fortnight provides proof that some companies are meant to survive while never thriving, a Groundhog’s Day of torture that shames every other professional franchise ever.
This is a wordier version of “Clippers gonna Clipper,” but it is worth remembering that for them, these are still the glory days.
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Feh.
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The Sacramento Kings unveiled their new logo, only five days after SportsLogos.com revealed it for them, but the key here is that there are four alternate logos to go along with it, which suggests that someone is very anxious not to brand the team but to make them harder to find.
Then again, you learn, as Comrade Ham tells us, “The Kings are paying for fans to get tattoos of their new logo at local tattoo shops. First come, first serve. Interesting,” and you realize that this is a forward-thinking organization that understands that there’s branding, and then there’s branding.
News
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Houston Rocket Jason Terry guarantees a win in Game 5 Wednesday for the best reason ever:
“I’m guaranteeing it. If i don’t, then what? It’s a loss. I believe in my group. We can get a win here.”
“If I don’t, then what?” Words to live by, I think we can all agree.
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I know two people who are not co-authoring Dan Boyle’s autobiography. And I know two people whom Boyle might see drowning and race to bring them each a hippo to carry.
Other than that, Boyle and the two reporters he called out in his season-ending presser, Larry Brooks and Brett Cyrgalis of the New York Post, will feel much better about each other in . . . oh, 30 years. That’s the way it almost always works.
Unless it doesn’t.
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In case your kids decide, despite all the evidence and your desperate fears, to become journalists, if they’re really very good and dogged and persistent and professional and lucky, they might be able to get what David Conn of The Guardian got after his months and years diligently chasing the trail of the Hillsborough disaster that killed 96 Liverpool fans and was covered up for two decades by a negligent police department that blamed drunken Liverpool fans for the crush inside the stadium that killed so many people. Conn’s work was instrumental in breaking the wall of silence that finally resulted in a report proving the police’s complicity, so when he stood up to ask a question today, he got this.
A good day, frankly.
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Gary Lineker, the former English soccer star and current BBC (and occasional NBC) face, vowed in December that he would do a Match of the Day show in only his underwear if Leicester City, the club with which he began his career, won the Premier League championship. Now that it looks damned likely, he is starting to waver on his vow to do the nation’s most-watched soccer show in just his skivs, telling the Radio Times:
“You’ll have to wait and see. I’ve kind of said I’ll have to do it. The conversation’s been had. I’ve told (the MOTD producers) many times, ‘Please tell me I can’t do it’. When I sent the tweet in December, I categorically knew there was zero chance that we would win.”
He even told The Independent that he never promised to do the entire show in his shorts, which is kind of weaselly, but he still seems mostly committed, saying, “I’m in good shape for an old bastard. I’ll probably work out for the two weeks beforehand very, very hard.”
Yeah, like anyone in England is going to be watching that match.
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And finally, if you didn’t see this, you should, even allowing for the high squeam factor, because the position most favored by educators is often the full revolted cringe.