LOS ANGELES — Between 1976 and 1991, the franchise first known as the Braves and later the Clippers changed names once, cities three times and coaches 10 times.
Through it all, one thing never changed — an inability to reach the playoffs.
Those 15 consecutive seasons without making the postseason were an NBA record and — together with a later 14-year span featuring just one playoff appearance — morphed the Clippers into shorthand for professional sports mismanagement as one Sisyphean season after another fell short.
Saturday night inside Crypto.com Arena marked an ignominious passing of the torch.
The regular season’s penultimate day featured a visit by a Sacramento Kings team mercifully near the end of its record 16th consecutive season without a playoff appearance. As a matter of record, the tie-breaking moment occurred April 3 when the Kings were mathematically eliminated from postseason contention. But Saturday night’s 117-98 Clippers win, to improve to 41-40, was the symbolic handoff between franchises now on diverging paths — one a day closer to the end of a season, another hoping the night would help prepare it to extend its season a little longer come next week.
Because the Clippers’ play-in tournament game Tuesday in Minnesota will be the Clippers’ third game in four nights, they are expected to use their key contributors lightly, if at all, in Sunday’s regular-season finale against Oklahoma City. The clearest sign of that was when coach Tyronn Lue reinserted star Paul George into a fourth quarter despite a double-digit lead. That made Saturday perhaps the Clippers’ last opportunity to fine-tune the core lineups they will roll out against the Timberwolves in hopes of winning and securing the seventh seed, and a first-round series with the Memphis Grizzlies.
The Clippers are as healthy as they have been all season, with Kawhi Leonard the only core rotation member still sidelined, allowing the kind of fast start they hope will carry over into Tuesday after George made five of his first six shots, including four three-pointers. George, who had 23 points and eight rebounds, ended the first quarter with 14 points, only two fewer than the Kings, and with the Clippers leading by 15.
Not all appeared so easy. A noticeable number of early passes, often from point guard Reggie Jackson, and shots inside the paint missed their target. Jackson and Morris combined to make seven of their 22 shots to extend Jackson’s cold shooting to three straight games. And a 12-0 run by the Kings cut a 20-point lead to seven early in the third quarter, aided by Clippers sloppiness.
Yet the players the Clippers need most in rhythm Tuesday are George and Norman Powell, and both left no doubt about their readiness despite only recently returning from injuries. Acting as a de facto point guard, George threaded a right-handed assist to a cutting Ivica Zubac from a wildly difficult angle, hooked over his head, then whipped a pass from the top of the arc to the corner for an open Luke Kennard three-pointer. He tied his season high with six three-pointers on nine attempts, and his career-high-tying 12 assists led to 30 points.
Powell scored 20 points off the bench, and in two games since returning from a foot fracture that cost him seven weeks, he has made 12 of his 2 shots and eight of his 12 three-pointers.
“The team is ready,” Zubac, who had a double-double in the first half and finished with 15 points and 12 rebounds, said Friday before a practice. “We got PG and Norm back now, and we’re much better than we were a few weeks ago.”
En route to making 21 of their 43 three-point tries, the Clippers set a record for most made three-pointers in a single season.
Jackson, who finished with seven points and four turnovers against Sacramento, was with George on Thursday night when the matchup with Minnesota became official. The news turned a casual night of hanging out into a rush of nervous energy knowing a first-round berth is not guaranteed.
“I can’t tell people what my heart felt,” Jackson said. “It just, everything changed in an instant. Like oh, snap.”
The Clippers have spent the past few days wrapping their minds around the concept of the play-in, a format foreign to them until now. It carries the stakes of a Game 7, yet there is no Game 6 to draw adjustments from. And if the Clippers lose in Minnesota, they would have one, final chance to advance to the postseason Friday.
“We can’t start slow. We can’t ease into it,” Lue said. “Normally, we won’t make adjustments until the second or third game. … so we got to be prepared from the jump ball. So it is different. And we fought all season long to get into this position, and we were fortunate enough to get the eighth seed, so we got a chance to play two games to win one.”
