Exits: This Western has no last 15 minutes

Writer John Saward on the Clippers as leathery rock gods playing a Super Bowl halftime show, as failed horse thieves, as tired, as themselves.

If it is true that Los Angeles is a land of big shots, then it is also one of panicked strivers, extras and wash-outs, handsome but wilting half-stars living with the secret agony of their looming insignificance.

This is an easy joke to make about the Clippers, relentlessly rebranding, reconfiguring, games crammed into some sleepy Saturday afternoon slot while the Lakers stretch their legs out in primetime. It’s a snide and unfair joke, no doubt about it. They’ve sent out terrific teams for years now, and anyway just look at the Lakers, each season spiraling into new and unbelievable calamity, frantic and transparent leaks to win the optics race mid-season, mid-game; dozens of “content producers” arriving all the time for one more refried Darvin Ham meme that just radiates with a harrowing need for attention. Those are very unwell people.

But you would have to say that this Clippers season really did have a whiff of that second-class anxiety, a paranoid franchise whose moment was vanishing, pleading for five more minutes. For half a decade they were everyone’s Hypothetical Annihilator, an inevitable dynasty just as soon as everyone finished rehab. Then last summer there was a sudden reappraisal. They had become the problem with the modern game, spoiled and overpaid, scamming the system, never there when you needed them, micromanaged by some secret sports science department sending biometric data down to Ty Lue.