The Land of CP3, and the Home of the.... Braves?

[captainsblog]

Get ready to fall off of your chair. This post is going to be about.... basketball- in particular, the NBA. 

I haven't followed the sport in decades, ever since the league broke my heart in high school by admitting my hometown New York Nets to the NBA and promptly forcing it to trade its best player (Julius "Dr. J" Erving) to raise the exorbitant rights fees. When the team moved to New Jersey soon thereafter, I lost all remaining interest, and never restored it even through the eras of Bird and Magic, or of Michael, or of the current crop of immature millionaires.

I did feel a twinge of hoop nostalgia, though, seeing this piece in the USA Today on the lunchroom table today:


LOS ANGELES – When the Los Angeles Clippers take the floor at Staples Center, no one forgets the tenant of record for lo these many years. The Los Angeles Lakers' championship banners offer impressive reminders.

But a growing number of Clippers fans are finding it cool to follow this young, athletic and improving team.

One reason is the Clippers are in the playoffs — that's something different.

It certainly is. The piece goes on to throw in this fun fact of lovable loserdom:

The franchise went 30 years between winning playoff series — from 1975-76 to 2005-06. Since moving from San Diego to Los Angeles in 1984, the Clippers have won two playoff series, one in 2006 and one Sunday.

What it doesn't tell you, there or anywhere, is that they won that earlier 1975-76 series, not in San Diego, but in a city that had an NBA franchise ripped from its municipal heart right around the same time the Nets broke mine.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the resurrected ghost of the Buffalo Braves.

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The NBA was long gone from here by the time I arrived in the 80s, but I'd listened to radio out of Buffalo back in their days of sharing the Aud with the Sabres.  "Twoooooooo for McAdooooooo!" and "Ernie No-D!" are still phrases fondly remembered among that greater generation of sport fan here.  The team had a bit of success a mere few years after its founding, but bad luck and bad management took their toll. In time, the original owner (local hotel magnate and Darien Lake developer Paul Snyder) sold the team to Kentucky Fried Chicken executive John Y. Brown and a Rochester furniture store owner named Harry Mangurian. He, in turn, cut a deal to swap franchises with the Boston Celtics, at one of the rare downtimes in that storied team's history. For their final year in the Aud, the Braves suffered with all the old Celtics' bad players, but didn't get the draft pick that turned into Larry Bird, who singlehandedly would have saved the franchise. Instead, they said "California is the place you wanna be" and moved, first to San Diego and then up the freeway to become the Lakers' little brothers.

The Clippers have a little bit of this history on their official website- here- perhaps because they have so little history of their own to brag about. They did make a bit of a deal of this being their 25th anniversary season in Lalaland, but neither their legacy nor ours is much to pontificate about. Neither Clippers nor Braves have championship banners to hang from the rafters, and none of their handful of Aud-era greats have had their numbers retired- not even the franchise's lone Hall of Famer McAdoo.

Today's Clippers are about to start their second playoff round, as are their fellow Staples tenants. They knocked off their first round opponent more handily than the Lakers did theirs (the elder team taking a full seven-game series to escape Denver). Much of the newfound hope comes from the Clippers' homegrown superstar Blake Griffin, but also from the bizarre set of moves that landed longtime league force Chris Paul (aka "CP3") in Los Angeles over the last off-season. New Orleans needed to trade Chris Paul before he hit free agency, and the team had worked out a deal with the Lakers, but league commissioner David Stern- the same one who brokered the bolting of the Braves 35 years ago- put the kibosh on the trade, ultimately approving a different one landing CP3 in the Clippers' locker room down the hall.

It's unlikely, but possible, that the two LA teams will meet in the conference finals. If that happens, for the first time this century, I will actually watch an NBA game, just to show my support for the last remnants of Buffalo in the world of professional hoops.

Comments

[shadowhuntress.livejournal.com]

Oh those dear Clips. I've always been fond of them. The last basketball game I ever attended was a Clipper game many years ago, back when Staples Center was new (because the tickets were cheaper than those for a Laker game). They lost, of course. ;-) I'm so glad they made it to the second round this year because it would have been sad if the other two Staples Center sports teams advanced while the Clippers were left out in the cold. I totally agree it's highly unlikely the Lakers and Clippers will survive to face each other, but it would be hilarious!