NBA: L.A. Clippers Continue Streak of Bad Luck

In the long history of the National Basketball Association, and perhaps organized sports in the United States, no other team has shown the type of ineptness that the Los Angeles Clippers have.

Started as a franchise in Buffalo, the Buffalo Braves to be exact, in 1970, the franchise that is the Los Angeles Clippers have a great history of resembling the burger meat more associated to the traditional term "franchise" than their more successful city brothers, the Los Angeles Lakers.

The stats would be funny if they weren't so horribly true: seven seasons at .500 or over in forty-seven years, only seven play-off appearances in those forty-seven years, a record that sports over seven-hundred more losses than wins, etc. To the Clippers seven appears to be a magic number. However, it probably isn't the magic that most numerologists expect.

Mismanagement has been the most obvious reason for why the Clippers are terrible. For one, they kept the name "Clippers" after moving to the city of Los Angeles. Once they had moved to Los Angeles, in 1984, their owner, Donald "I'm Always Smiling in the Face of Futility" Sterling, had a chance to rework the entire Clippers' image. He could have changed the name for one. I mean, does anyone really know what a Clipper is? And, what in the world does the word "clipper" have to do with basketball? More significantly, why would you name your basketball team after something that most of your fans would never in a million years have the chance of owning?

To most Los Angelenos...heck, to most everyone in the world, the word "clipper" means a hair-cutting instrument. That would make the Clippers a set of hair-cutting instruments.