Given that the Los Angeles fires are still active, and given furthermore that the destruction they have wrought seems to be nearly area-wide, the idea of a basketball game worth watching in Los Angeles right now seems almost preposterous; whether such a game would be worth playing at all is its own debate.
Thus, we view last night’s Clippers-Nets game at the Intuit Dome—the Clippers’ new and lavishly toileted home, a building that has generated no discernible buzz even from the moment it opened in October—with little of the wonder or delight one can usually derive from a game in which one team is fully staffed and the other is barely at half strength. Which was, in this case, also one in which the home team had a full day’s rest and was playing at home and the other had played the night before 1100 miles away. I mean, what could the end result possibly be? Well, you guessed wrong. It was miles worse than that.
For all that grisly context, the final score of 126-67 to the Clippers still seems ludicrous. It is the tenth most lopsided game in league history; Brooklyn’s point total is the lowest for a losing team in the last eight years. The Nets didn’t want to be there for several perfectly good reasons, and if they had a most valuable player on this least valuable night, it had to be Noah Clowney, the slightly used second-year power forward who was ejected with 9:55 to play for yelling at referee James Williams, who probably didn’t want to be there either.
Naturally, the game story in The Athletic took an odd form, concentrating on Kawhi Leonard’s “breakout” game, which also happened to be his fourth game of the season after missing the first 34 due to injury. Leonard did have 23 points in 24 minutes and his plus-minus (never a terribly useful stat) was a hilarious plus-46, but also no Clipper starter didn’t have a hilarious plus-minus figure; Clippers center Ivica Zubac was plus-48 in just 22 minutes. Brooklyn, down three starters (Ben Simmons, Cam Johnson, and the freshly exiled D’Angelo Russell) were game to go for a quarter, but by halftime the reality had set in; they didn’t need or particularly want to be there, and for the rest of the game they only barely were.
The game nobody wanted was also one very few people wanted to attend. The announced attendance of 13,091 was the Clippers’ lowest in a non-COVID season in 14 years, and the previous low was a game against Sacramento on Thanksgiving night in 2010. And since most attendance figures are fudged for amusement, one could trust one’s eyes and assume that fewer than 10,000 people were actually in the building. The Intuit Dome may have the shortest honeymoon of any new or remodeled arena/stadium in the real estate era of American sport; the home team’s longest sellout streak so far is two.
None of that is relevant to this moment, though, in which the search for normalcy in a time of crisis can be defended only by the notion that sports can offer occasional some value as a distraction. The 13,091 people in the building, give or take a few thousand, probably needed to get away from the crushing realities of Southern California at the moment. Even watching the Nets’ backups miss nearly 70 percent of their shots for a few hours had to be an improvement upon watching the vindictive wing of our national political spectrum flex and preen at the prospect of withholding federal aid. Given how bad everything else is, even this was a game worth playing. Somehow everything else was even worse.
But it was never going to be quality entertainment, and because the Nets’ schedule screamed for a load management night, the result was well ordained. The players’ individual numbers were exceptional, but the attendance figure on that Thanksgiving night 14 years ago was exceptional, too. When the 24th and 25th best teams in a 30-team league get together on a national family holiday, you’re going to get a sea of unused upholstery disguised as things that house people.
Indeed, the only reason we noticed this game at all, even in the rearview mirror, was because it was so deficient as competition. It wasn’t the best or worst result ever—the most lopsided loss in NBA history would be Memphis 152, Oklahoma City 79 three years ago; Defector’s story on that game has the word “Thunderfart” in the headline. With all due respect to Kawhi Leonard, nobody had their best or worst game in this one, either. It was just a game of little note that let us momentarily forget all the things we can’t block out. And in that context, Noah Clowney leaving 10 minutes early might have worked against him. Being the first to go back outside is not a desirable outcome these days.
