We all thought Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling had turned the corner from the ugly days. The days when he used to heckle his own players during games. The days when he didn’t take care of the people in his organization. The days when he’d accuse the best player he’s ever had of manipulating the front office decisions. The days of being the absolute laughingstock of the league and not giving a hoot, as long as he was saving and banking.
The seemingly renewed version of him has been flexing his wallet since the arrival of Chris Paul, and hasn’t been shy about adding the type of pieces that help win championships. Never too late to change, right? But then we get this gem of a story below, where he manages to humiliate the best coach he has ever had almost immediately after acquiring him.
STORY OF THE DAY:
Sterling nearly blew up the deal involving Eric Bledsoe, J.J. Redick and Jared Dudley back in July. Mysteriously, he came back around, perhaps realizing that his questionable decision-making could cost him a lot more than Bledsoe. Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports has details of this bizarre, yet not-surprising event:
In the early afternoon hours of July 3, owner Donald Sterling called Los Angeles Clippers president Andy Roeser and informed him he had rescinded approval on moving Eric Bledsoe and acquiring free agent J.J. Redick in a sign-and-trade agreement. The three-team deal – delivered the owner’s blessing only two days earlier – no longer interested Sterling.
Call it off, Sterling instructed Roeser, league sources told Yahoo Sports.
Deal’s dead.
It didn’t matter the news had broken 24 hours earlier of the Clippers sending Bledsoe and Caron Butler to the Phoenix Suns with the Suns’ Jared Dudley and Milwaukee’s Redick, on a four-year, $27 million contract, joining Los Angeles. It didn’t matter the public had been praising Doc Rivers’ first deal as the new senior vice president of basketball operations and coach, that Rivers and general manager Gary Sacks had given their word to teams, agents and players that this was a finalized agreement.
With Sterling, rational thought and debate aren’t always part of the discussion. Whatever his reasons, everyone else awaited Rivers’ conversations with Sterling. Rivers contract gave him ultimate management authority on deals, and several sources dealing with the Clippers say that Rivers was beyond embarrassed and humiliated. He feared the unraveling of the deal would cost him his credibility and paralyze him in future trade and negotiation talks, sources said.
[…]
Rivers’ job was to convince the owner – for a second time, in this instance – and there were those who believed a flat refusal on Sterling’s behalf could’ve resulted with Rivers’ resignation.
“It never got to that,” one source told Yahoo Sports, “but it might have had Sterling not come around.”
Only Rivers will ever know, because Sterling did change his mind and the deal was resuscitated within 72 hours of it falling apart. Downright disaster had been averted, and on the night of July 11, Clippers officials, Redick and his representatives came together to sign the contract papers in the lobby of a Los Angeles hotel.
The story goes to show that ultimately, the less we hear of this guy, the better.
WORTH A LISTEN:
1. Jeff Van Gundy talks about the need to get rid of incentives for teams to lose – he believes all teams should have equal opportunities during the draft, to which I say he might be losing his mind. The ESPN analyst also touched on why he thinks the Brooklyn Nets are the most talented team in the East, along with his relationship with David Stern and why it has never been and never will be good. Listen here in Brian Windhorst of ESPN’s podcast.
2. Phil Jackson had an extended conversation with Seth Davis in this video. The coach explained why he was unlikely to accept the coaching job with the Lakers last season, why it’s wrong to say that you can’t win a championship with Dwight Howard as your center, and why Michael Jordan has been failing as the owner of a team (hint: don’t hire friends).
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “It was all politics”
It’s no secret that Pau Gasol was relegated to a minor role with the Los Angeles Lakers last season. The center came off the bench at times, played mostly out of position (as he has for the past few seasons), and didn’t play up to his capabilities. A major part of it was his compromised health, but Mike D’Antoni now admits that politics had a lot to do with how he used Gasol. Sam Amick of USA Today has details:
“It was very uncomfortable,” D’Antoni said about the Howard-Gasol dynamic last season. “I knew I was messing on (Gasol) last year. That’s not fair to him. But that was the situation we were in. How do we make the best of it? I was just trying to make the best of it. But no, it wasn’t fair to him.
“I think it was all (politics). It was all that. We wouldn’t do that (normally). If nobody had names on their jerseys, and we were just playing? You go through Pau. There’s not a question. No question.”
Meanwhile, Gasol went through a very specific procedure over the summer that seems to have revitalized his body enough for him to feel confident about returning to the “Gasol of old”. He described how deteriorated he felt prior to the procedure:
“I definitely believe I can do it,” Gasol told USA TODAY Sports this week. “I know it. I bounced back really well. The procedure went well, my tendons are a lot healthier now than they were before. I have a lot more healthy tissue that regenerated well. I worked hard during the summer to be in the position that I’m in today, and I look forward to just to going out there and doing what I know best.”
The May 9 “FAST technique” procedure may have been minimally invasive, but it left him in crutches and — because of its newness in the medical community — unsure whether it would work. Stem cells were taken from his pelvis and injected into his knees to replace the damaged tissue that had been removed. Ultrasound wavelengths were aimed at his tendons in order to debride the damage in there too. Gasol said the procedure had only been performed 20 times when he decided to become the 21st, but it was far more attractive than the alternative.
“I had nothing to lose really, because as painful as (the knees were) feeling at the time and through last year, I just needed to do something,” Gasol said. “I just couldn’t continue otherwise. I would’ve gone down.
“You’re much more limited. You can’t explode. You can’t really jump. You can’t really bend as much. You can’t move as quickly and explosively. You’ve just got to adjust and with my skills and my IQ, I could still be productive, but not the go-to guy probably.”
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