By losing to the Pelicans tonight, the Clippers joined their neighbors the Lakers on vacation. No Los Angeles team will therefore be in the Playoffs this year, and that’s still quite funny when you remember the hype surrounding the LA battle when Kawhi Leonard, Paul George and Anthony Davis arrived in city.
Summer 2019. AD joins LeBron James at the Lakers to form an XXL duo supposed to put the legendary Californian franchise back on top. At the same time, the Clippers do a huge double blow by recovering PG-13 and Kawhi, determined to take power in Los Angeles. The Battle of LA is born and everyone is thinking of only one thing: a future conference final that puts the City of Angels in turmoil. “The Staples Center is the big winner of the summer,” even declared the King at the time.
Let’s say a lot has changed since then, and not just the name of the Los Angeles venue.
Because yes, almost three years later, the Lakers and the Clippers find themselves on vacation even before the start of the Playoffs. This sentence is incredible but it is very real. As a result, the Battle of LA that we are still waiting for on the courts will finally take place on the beaches of Santa Monica. And we wonder if we will one day be entitled to a confrontation between the two Hollywood teams in the Playoffs. In 2020, LeBron and Co. had come to the end but the Clippers had choke well in the Mickey bubble. In 2021, the Clips had a superb run in the Playoffs, but the Lakers fell in the first round against the Suns, disturbed in particular by the injuries of AD and LBJ. And so in 2022, they will both watch the postseason on TV. It’s the first time since 2018 that neither LA team has made the playoffs, and only the second since the early 2000s.
So obviously, we are on two radically different paths this year. The Lakers may have had the worst season in their glorious history, going from favorites for the title to a poor team unable to grab the play-in tournament. A monumental fail on which we will not go into detail here because we have already talked a lot about it, but above all a fail that will be remembered. Regarding the Clippers, it’s the opposite. They were private for a good part of Kawhi Leonard’s season (out all year) et Paul George (51 games missed), but still managed to enter the Top 8 in the West with a barely positive record (42 wins – 40 losses). A very honorable season therefore in view of the unfavorable circumstances, because many teams would have simply given up on this campaign. Unfortunately for the Clips, it has just ended in a hard-to-swallow defeat at the gates of the Playoffs, which saw Paul George catch COVID at the worst of times. No luck. In short, between shame for the Lakers and disappointment for the Clippers, the City of Angels finds itself today deprived of the orange ball and will have to find another activity to entertain itself in the coming weeks.
Three years ago, Los Angeles was the center of attention, even more than usual. We even talked about the capital of basketball. Today, the Californian city is simply wiped off the Playoffs map. And that, we are still not used to.
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