The Clippers' new logo and uniforms inevitably got your incurable NBA nostalgist thinking ...
About Buffalo, naturally
The Los Angeles Clippers and moi ...
Let's just say it's complicated.
The Buffalo Braves, as many of you probably know by now, were my favorite team as a young Western New Yorker in the 1970s. The team abruptly moved to San Diego to become the Clippers after an unprecedented owner-for-owner trade involving Buffalo's John Y. Brown and Boston's Irv Levin swapping franchises after the 1977-78 season. I was too young to really understand it all at the time, but Levin became the Clippers' owner and moved the team from Buffalo to San Diego ... over the same summer that my family moved across the country to Southern California.
As an irrational kid absolutely fuming about my beloved Braves ceasing to exist and struggling to cope with my first real life lesson about sport as business, I stubbornly and unilaterally decided that I would refuse to recognize the Clippers as a continuation of the same franchise. When I look back on the ridiculousness of it now, I think what it really speaks to is how little televised access we had to the NBA at the time. We relocated to a mere hour north of the Clippers' home base and I can't remember having an ounce of TV exposure to them. No one ever really mentioned them, as I remember it, until Donald Sterling bought the team from Levin and — in a handy illustration for the way Sterling operated across 33 (mostly) laughingstock seasons — moved it to Los Angeles in 1984 without the NBA's permission.
The Levin-and-Sterling-owned Clippers, after how badly the Braves were mismanaged by completely forfeiting the opportunity to field a frontcourt starring Bob McAdoo, Adrian Dantley and Moses Malone — which is merely one example of the Braves’ ineptitude — made it pretty easy for Spurned Little Steiny to just delete them out of my life.
Had I seen the occasional San Diego Clippers game, I'm sure it would have been harder to make the clean break I did. Two of my favorite players — Randy Smith and Swen Nater — were on that first Clippers team. So was the newly acquired World B. Free!
Smith was dealt to Cleveland after the Clippers' maiden season in San Diego but returned in 1982-83 and became the NBA's all-time leader in consecutive games played while a Clipper (later surpassed by the Mavericks' A.C. Green in November 1997 in an achievement covered obsessively by yours truly for The Dallas Morning News). Nater, meanwhile, led the NBA rebounding one season as a Clipper.
The team even kept much of the Braves' uniform color scheme at the beginning, but none of it mattered. Only the mighty Lakers tangibly existed in that part of the world as a certain Magic Johnson was entering the league. The Clippers (née Braves) had broken my embryonic sports heart and were largely barred from my consciousness except for the rare trading card that made it into my possession. (Then Topps bizarrely stopped making basketball cards for about a decade after 1981-82, which is truly hard to believe now given the modern state of the collectibles world and remembering that Magic and Larry Bird had just matriculated to the pros … with Michael Jordan not far away.)
Of course, in retrospect, it was probably a good thing for yours truly that the Clippers were such a non-entity to me in San Diego. Without warning, I was handed the life-changing opportunity to break into NBA reporting in February 1994 as The Los Angeles Daily News' (you guessed it) Clippers beat writer. There were no emotional ties to sever in the name of journalistic professionalism because I had long since decided that there was no connection between my former favorite team and the team I would now be chronicling ... no matter what the NBA record books say.
I certainly, in all candor, did not expect to be writing about any of this on this particular Newsletter Tuesday.
Yet it all came rushing back to me Monday when the Clippers unveiled images of their new logo and uniforms for next season.
The nautical-themed logo to me (and others) is meh ... but I'm really glad they didn't change the name of the franchise. Clippers owner Steve Ballmer has said often over the years that he's had the urge to start completely over since he took charge of the team in August 2014, but Clippers fans have consistently lobbied him to leave the Clipper part of the equation alone. Ballmer cares about his customers and crucially keeps pouring millions and millions into the team and its infrastructure.
That he listened to the fans on the team nickname makes me smile more than I anticipated. Maybe, after all these years, your ever-sappy correspondent has a softer spot for the Braves' successors than I realized.
Or maybe the various Braves retro items that the Clippers have been selling in recent years — something seemingly never even contemplated in the 1990s when I was frequently around them and Braves were scarcely acknowledged — have worn me down.
I'm banking on a bountiful wave of absolutely sick Braves gear on the shelves (CC: Mitchell & Ness) two years from now when Ballmer and the Clippers host the 2026 NBA All-Star Game at the new Intuit Dome. But there's something I'd love to see even more: McAdoo's No. 11 raised to the Intuit rafters.
It's a grave injustice that McAdoo's No. 11 and Smith's No. 9 don't hang high above … whether we’re talking Clipperland or the Buffalo Sabres' KeyBank Center home as an homage to what those two greats meant to Buffalonians and The 716. The Clippers and the Toronto Raptors, for the record, are the only two teams on the modern-day NBA map that have yet to retire a single number.
Let's fix that, Clips. If the connection between the Braves and the Clippers is so undeniable, honoring the Hall of Famer who won three scoring titles and an MVP award in Buffalo's baby blue is long, long overdue.
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Numbers Game
🏀 28.5
San Antonio's Victor Wembanyama is averaging 20.7 points, 10.1 rebounds and a league-leading 3.3 blocked shots in just 28.5 minutes per game as a rookie.
🏀 2
Only two players in league history averaged 20/10/3 for their careers: Hakeem Olajuwon and David Robinson.
🏀 74
The Lakers' LeBron James needs only 74 more points to crack 40,000 for his NBA career in the regular season.
🏀 7.5
Have you noticed that the 45-12 Celtics have opened up a fat 7 1/2-game lead on their closest pursuers (Cleveland) in the East with less than a third of the season remaining? Minnesota and Oklahoma City are tied atop the West at 40-17 ... with the defending champions from Denver just a game and a half behind at 39-19.
🏀 8
We continue to ask how and why Sacramento's Domantas Sabonis was snubbed from the Western Conference All-Star team. Our fellow Substacker
points out that Sabonis has recorded a triple-double in a remarkable eight of his past 10 games to take his league-leading total for the season to 21.🏀 1998-99
This season was the first since the NBA campaign shortened to 50 games by a lockout in 1998-99 that did not begin with Doc Rivers holding a coaching job. Rivers, of course, is now back in coaching in Milwaukee after the Bucks fired Adrian Griffin just 43 games into Griffin's first season as a head coach (and with a record of 30-13). I wrote about Rivers in the Monday Musings here:
🏀 16
This is only the Thunder's 16th season in Oklahoma City.
🏀 3
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is bidding to become Oklahoma City’s third MVP in that short span, joining Kevin Durant (2014-15) and Russell Westbrook (2016-17).
🏀 2
Philadelphia is the only other NBA franchise with multiple MVPs in the 2000s: Allen Iverson (2000-01) and Joel Embiid (last season).
🏀 7,250
The Oklahoman recently reported that the NBA deems cities ineligible to host All-Star Weekend unless they have at league 7,250 available hotel rooms ... and a minimum of three five-star hotels ... and 650,000 feet of convention center exhibition space … and an airport that offers at least 75 non-stop domestic flights and 20 international flights.
🏀 94
The recorded high temperature at DFW Airport on Monday was 94 degrees. Ninety-freaking-four. Reminder: It is not yet March. (And now you know why I enjoyed the snowy scenes we were served up at All-Star Weekend in Indianapolis.)
All-Star Weekend Photo Album
🏀 1981
If you're a Pop-A-Shot fan you'll be interested to know that the arcade basketball company has a new version out for your home office and a March Madness contest underway if you're looking for fun distractions from doing work. It has to be the sturdiest over-the-door hoop I've ever come across. More info here if you want to check it out. (PS — The original Pop-A-Shot, I recently learned, debuted in 1981.)
🏀 97.1
One last reminder before we go: I'm on the radio Saturdays from noon to 1 PM CT on 97.1 (FM) The Freak in Dallas with an hour of live NBA talk presented by Panini Trading Cards and Collectibles. Join us online by clicking the link embedded in this sentence or via the iHeart radio app to listen to The Saturday Stein Line on this or any Saturday ... or catch the podcasted version of the show once it drops via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or #whereveryougetyourpodcasts. And we repeat: Click the microphone icon on the 97.1 (FM) The Freak feed on the iHeart Radio app to leave a 30-second message or a question for me to answer on an upcoming show.
Mcadoo Dantlel and Moses??? Please tell me more
I'd forgotten that John Y. Brown owned the Braves after he owned and folded the Kentucky Colonels (your 1975 ABA Champion Kentucky Colonels, that is). He was a villain in my home state for not wanting to pay $3M to have the Colonels be part of the merger, although there has since been a lot written about some NBA franchises not wanting such a strong team to join in the merger. Brown was also married to Phyllis George.
It was such a wild period of pro basketball history.