Overcoming The Blasé: Los Angeles’s ‘Other” Basketball Team

I hope all of you had a productive Veterans Day. For me, a friend of mine invited me to go watch an NBA game at the hallowed Staples Center, home of the world champion Los Angeles Lakers, out of the blue. The problem is we were going to watch the Los Angeles Clippers play the Oklahoma City Thunder. Not exactly a desirable matchup, but a free game is a free game and I wasn’t about to let this golden opportunity pass me up. With injuries plaguing the Clippers, I wasn’t too surprised when they fell apart in the fourth quarter due to their slackening on defense and jump shots characteristically clanging off the iron. It’s just the Clippers being the Clippers, right?

Now if you even just casually follow professional basketball, you’ll know that the Los Angeles Clippers are the ‘other’ basketball team in Los Angeles; the illegitimate half-brother of the Los Angeles Lakers that prefers Walmart to Melrose. The year that the Lakers finally ascended to the pinnacle of professional basketball achievement by winning the NBA championship, the Clippers tallied a record of 19-63, attained an overall number one draft pick via lottery and pretty much quietly concluded another humdrum, typically Clipperesque season.

So what am I trying to get at? The Clippers are bad. That’s already pretty much a given. But do the players expect themselves to be bad? There has been a culture of failure associated with the Clippers organization for so long. Is there an expectation to underperform once you’ve inked your contract? Of course not. Even when situations become blasé, there is still reason to hope.

1. The past is history. If you want to succeed at anything in life, you have to disassociate yourself from the past. Neither your past failures nor your past successes define who you are at the moment. Your failures were a learning experience, a stepping stone on your way to future success. Some people have more stepping stones than others, but it’s not about how many you have; it’s about your persistence in continuing on and accomplishing your goals in the end.

2. There’s hope for the future. You aren’t the person you once were. You’ve really come a long way, even though to you it might seem almost imperceptible. You might still have a long way to go but you have less of a distance to travel today than you did yesterday. So consider the future with a hopeful attitude. Your day will come so don’t give up!

What does this have to do with the Los Angeles Clippers? Not much, except if they’ve still got hope and are still showing up for professional basketball games, then you have no reason to not show up in life. They might be bruised, battered and at times look sloppy as a D2 college team playing summer ball, but they’re not playing because they expect to lose, and with the future resting on the shoulders of young studs like Blake Griffin, Al Thornton and Eric Gordon, mark my words, the Los Angeles Clippers are definitely in for better days.