LOS ANGELES — It might be dumb to doubt Tyronn Lue’s culinary prowess.
Let the man cook, let him tinker. Listen to him tell you enough times to your face “nothing’s changed, nothing’s any different,” even after darn near everything has changed and is different. And then watch his teams go out and play like they don’t care whether the sky is green and the ball is turkey-shaped and Kawhi Leonard and/or Paul George is or isn’t available – and you’d also have faith in Lue’s ability to turn just about any mess into chicken salad.
Time and again over his five-plus seasons as the Clippers’ head coach, Lue has proved he can make a difficult situation palatable. That he’s capable of squeezing a lot out of a lemon. He’s the Clippers’ most reliable asset that way.
But I suspect he might have met his match. It’s tough to picture anyone saving this dish that is the 2025-26 Clippers, not without any of the right ingredients to work with, not with everything in this kitchen either expired or unripe.
You could smell it Tuesday night at Crypto.com Arena, where the Lakers thumped their former hallmates, 135-118.
Two teams heading in opposite directions. The Lakers, fueled by good vibes and star power, improved to 13-4 and currently occupy the second seed in the Western Conference.
In the other corner, the ever-hobbling Clippers sputtered to 5-13, eight games below .500 for the first time since Blake Griffin’s rookie season in 2010-11, when they finished 32-50. That was their last losing season, since which they’ve strung together 14 consecutive plus-.500 campaigns, best in the NBA at present.
They’ve also made the playoffs 12 times in that span – and also came close in 2022, finishing eighth before losing a pair of play-in games. An abrupt end to another stubbornly successful season, one without Leonard at all and without George for a lot of it. No matter, Lue said at one point, down his four top scorers: “I still feel confident that we got a lot in this locker room. We can still get it done.”
I remember covering the team then and thinking, this guy is nuts. But Lue was right, even with starting lineups of, say, Eric Bledsoe, Luke Kennard, Terance Mann, Nicolas Batum and Ivica Zubac, that team finished 42-40.
No, there have been no championships to speak of. But the Clippers surely should boast of their commitment to competitiveness.
That’s what makes this season so weird.
How utterly uncompetitive the Clippers have been.
It’s a problem. The Clippers won’t punt on a season, not on owner Steve Ballmer’s watch. But even if they would – they wouldn’t this year. They don’t own their draft pick next summer; no, the first-place, defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder hold the unprotected rights to the Clippers’ next-first round selection, further payment for the 2019 deal that sent reigning MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to OKC and brought George to L.A. for a star-crossed pairing with Leonard.
Should have seen it coming: This team – which also happens to be mired in an off-the-court controversy involving investigations into alleged salary-cap avoidance – is old.
Geriatric in NBA terms.
But many seemed to believe this aged crew, with names we recognized and résumés we respect. There was consensus – ESPN’s panel of insiders guessed the Clippers would be the league’s sixth-best team! – they’d have greatness left in their proverbial tanks to compete night-in and night-out.
It was as if no one remembered the 2021-22 Lakers. That other star-studded, past-its-prime team that also came into the season as the oldest team in the league (30.9 years old, on average!) and went on to finish 33-49 and 11th in the Western Conference? The season that cost Frank Vogel his job two years after taking the Lakers to a title?
That recent history was enough to give me pause about these Clippers before the season, but I believed in Lue. If anyone could whip up a winner out of leftover talent, it was him.
But this? This roster is so feeble and slow-footed, so untrendy, even Lue has been unable to make an appetizing watch of it. It’s one thing to have one vet on the court to slow things down when you need him to, it’s another to field a unit filled with them.
Longest-toothed team in the league with a wise-old-age average of 28.64 years and, to start, seven players in the rotation who were 32 or older. Well, until 32-year-old Bradley Beal was ruled out for the season recently with a hip injury and 37-year-old Brook Lopez was benched Tuesday because, as Lue put it, “it’s unfair to him, a lot of teams are playing small on second units and the speed of the game was kind of tough for him.”
Someone poured Orlando Magic guard Jalen Suggs some truth serum the other day and asked him about the Clippers: “No disrespect to the older guys,” he said, “it’s just, the league is evolving at such a rapid pace. It’s being played so fast that it’s hard for those guys to keep up with it each and every night.”
Indeed, against the Clippers on Tuesday, the Lakers – who are not especially fast and athletic – looked like the league’s fastest and most athletic team. Next up for the Clippers, a pair of huge games … against the Memphis Grizzlies (6-12) and Dallas Mavericks (5-14). Seriously, the Clippers really need to win those.
Only the Philadelphia 76ers are allowing more fast-break points per game than the Clippers, who give up, on average, 18.5 points in transition per night. They’re also constantly getting caught flat-footed, one of the league’s worst rebounding teams, averaging just 40 per game – and consequently giving up 16.6 second-chance points, seventh-most in the league.
In Season 17, James Harden is averaging 27.9 points per game, but collectively the Clippers are putting up just 112.2, fewer than all but four teams that have a combined record of 13-58.
The Clippers look cooked.
But Lue looked me in the eye Tuesday night and, taking the heat as coolly as ever, told me he thinks he can figure out a recipe for success.
“Things will change,” he said. “We have the right intent, we’re doing things the right way … things will get better. If we weren’t putting in the work and guys wouldn’t think we could win, then it’d be something totally different. But they are, and we are. The coaches are, we’re looking for all the answers.
“We’ll be OK. If we wouldn’t, I would tell you.”
And not for the first time, I thought: This guy is nuts.