LOSIN’ TIMES : As Bad as They Are, There’s Almost No Way the Clippers Will Be Able to Match 1972-73 76ers

The Clippers interrupted their season of futility with a rare win the other night and thus retired, for the moment, comparisons with the Failed Five, the infamous Philadelphia 76ers of 1972-73.

The Clippers gave it a nice run, give them that, losing 16 games in a row. But the 76ers could do that in their sleep, which is how many suspected they did it. Those 76ers, the sub-standard to which all awful basketball teams must forever be held, started 0-15, finished 0-13 and had a 0-20 streak in between during a 9-73 season.

The Clippers, despite their streaks--they lost 12 straight earlier this season--were never considered in that league. Of course, at 5-33 so far, they are not really thought to be in this league either. But even in the middle of their most recent dreadful streak, National Basketball Assn. coaches and players talked up the Clippers as not being nearly so bad as their record indicated, the only available solace to this team.

“They’re just snakebit,” said Atlanta Hawk Coach Mike Fratello, whose team couldn’t put the Clippers away until very late in their game last week. “This is a team you just can’t get away from. Coaches around the league will tell you that. Usually, a team that plays like that, it sneaks out one in three. They just can’t sneak it out.”

We do not mean to be cruel to the Clippers, who have suffered manfully, their heads high--and in one case, shaven--and so we invoke an excuse or two for the particular awfulness they’ve achieved. Starting guard Norm Nixon goes down with a blown knee before the season, the injury incurred in a Broadway softball league game. Coach Don Chaney is heard to give his regards to Broadway.

Star Marques Johnson acquires a back injury when he runs into the ample stomach of teammate Benoit Benjamin. Chaney is believed to have given his regards to Benjamin, too.

Guard Darnell Valentine, who had reason to be suspicious of his Clipper experience when the check that ended his holdout bounced, broke his hand jumping rope. It can be done, not easily, but it can be done. Give the Clippers enough rope, as they say. . . .

A lot of things have to go wrong for a team to go this bad, like Cedric Maxwell getting food poisoning on the road, or the team getting stuck on an Indianapolis runway for seven hours.

“Man, I woke up and thought we were landing in New Jersey, we’re just taking off,” recalls Maxwell, who Friday escaped further travails with the Clippers by being traded to the Houston Rockets.

But, if you know the Clippers, you know these horror stories, as well as those about the bungling that left them without Derek Smith and with their high pick way down in the third round, a player who didn’t even make the team. Not to forget the last player taken in the draft last year, who not only did make the team but who also has occasionally started ahead of supposed franchise Benjamin.

All this, subtracted up, can make for a very bad team, indeed. Still, we persist, the Clippers shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as those 76ers. The 76ers got their dubious distinction the old fashioned way. They earned it.

“Were we snakebit? “ asks Fred (Mad Dog) Carter, star of the NBA’s worst-ever team. “That makes me laugh. We were bad. No luck involved. Just bad. Oh, my, were we bad. Top to bottom. I mean, I considered myself a good player, but if I’m your leading scorer. . . . “

Carter, now an assistant coach with the Washington Bullets, has acquired some emotional distance from the experience and is now just able to laugh about it. “I mean, they give me the team MVP. I guess you could say I was ambivalent about it. I mean, was it because I led my team to 9 wins or 73 losses? I didn’t know how to take it.”

Carter had recently come from a playoff team in Baltimore and was accustomed to a level of excellence he could no longer locate on the floor.

“I mean, I’m used to Wes Unseld kicking the ball back out, or a guy named Gus Johnson, or a guy named Earl (the Pearl) Monroe, wheeling and dealing,” Carter recalls. “But now, with the 76ers, I look in and I don’t see Wes. I see every team’s 11th and 12th player, yours truly included. Oh, man. It was depressing.”

But it had to have been even worse for Leroy Ellis, Wilt Chamberlain’s backup on the NBA’s winningest team of the previous season. “Great,” says Ellis, now an assistant coach at USC, “I’m the answer to a trivia question, ‘Who went from the best team to the worst?’ ”

Ellis has a further and most peculiar distinction, having played on teams with both the greatest winning and losing streaks. “The losing streak, it wasn’t quite the same as when we won 33 straight for the Lakers,” he says. “Although when we finally won, that was real sweet. We all said, ‘Yeah, let’s go out and win the next one.’ Of course, that didn’t happen.”

Amazingly, both Ellis and Carter say, the team struggled cheerfully, not unlike the Clippers have.

Said Carter: “You would think that losing like that, there’d be some finger pointing, some dissension. Yet everybody retained their character.”

Added Ellis: “We could point fingers at the coach, or players, but in the final analysis, we just didn’t have what it takes to win. We just didn’t have someone to put in there.”

That is essentially the Clippers story, though nobody in his right mind would compare rosters. The 76ers did have a few names, like Hal Greer. But, as Carter said: “He was in his evening years and it was sad to see. Other than that, we were not great players.”

Even the names inspire suspicion. Manny Leaks? John Q. Trapp? Jeff Halliburton?

“Yeah, we did run through some players,” said Carter of the sizable roster. “Anybody we could pick off waivers. Trading our 11th guy for theirs. It was quite a conglomeration.”

Without talent, there was little use in pointing fingers, which explains the strange equanimity of that team. Same with the Clippers, according to Chaney.

“These guys are unbelievably light,” he said. “In the three rebuilding stages I went through (as a player) at Boston, I’d seen some disruption. Young players ready to take over for the older ones, and the resentment that caused. Players, when losing, tending to play individually. And not necessarily because they were selfish, but because they just wanted to win. Then, you reach a point when you’re not winning and the bench sees that. . . .

“But here, we make a move, they accept it. We don’t have great players, somebody out to maintain his 30-point average. They are aware of their limitations.”

In fact, even as the Clipper streak was about to stretch to 16, the players were joking in the dressing room. Maxwell had just shaved his head, promising to keep it that way until the team had won. “But nobody gets to rub it,” he cautioned, no doubt disappointing some teammates.

Meanwhile, Michael Cage, whose hair is magnificent, and Kurt Nimphius, whose mane is no less fabulous, decided they would let their hair grow until they won.

Cage, who claims Indian blood and who has recently taken to the name Flying Cloud, was explaining that “we’re not quitting, not rolling over. We could play like losers, but we don’t. We all came from winning programs, so this is very tough. I take it personal. I mean, from time to time, it does knock on your head. But we won’t self-destruct.”

That quality continued to amaze, not only Chaney but also Fratello. “When you can be on the last game of a road trip, and still fight back to a three-point game, that shows me a lot,” he said.

Which is why nobody expected the streak to go on indefinitely. The 76ers, on the other hand, expected no salvation in their low-water season. “Oh, you keep hoping you win,” Ellis said. “But down the line, 60 games or so, we got the feeling it would be nice to start fresh.”

Carter entertained only the briefest hope. He knew it would be tough, with Billy Cunningham returned to the ABA after a contract ruling, but after a 4-4 exhibition season, he thought it might go OK. Coach Roy Rubin brought some enthusiasm from the college ranks, and it didn’t look all that desperate.

“Then we went 0 for November,” Carter recalled . “You heard of people going 0 for 8 or something. We went 0 for months.”

Carter remembers that teams were sympathetic nonetheless. “They always said, ‘Aw, man, you’ll turn it around somewhere along the line.’ Then they’d give us our whipping and say come again. You know what they called us? The Universal Health Spa. We made everybody healthy, stopped all losing streaks.”

Ellis doesn’t remember that anybody took them lightly, either. “The thinking was, ‘How would you like to be the team that lost to the 76ers?’ ” You wouldn’t.

Eventually, the 76ers did win, but that didn’t foretell much. It is Carter’s recollection that they won, got on the plane to travel to Portland and sat on the runway under an ice storm. Didn’t get to their 8 p.m. game until 10 p.m. “First couple shots were air balls,” he remembers.

It wasn’t so funny then.

Something else was, though. Donnie May, with the Hawks one week, beat Philadelphia with a last-second shot. The next week, May was with the 76ers. “Now that was funny,” Carter said. When you’re that bad, you take your cheer where you find it.

Ellis said: “Once, after we won a couple of games, the owner told us he’d buy us dinner whenever we won. We didn’t break him on that one.”

As their season ground on, margins began to widen. The losing had acquired momentum. The desire, whatever there had been, dissipated. Rubin was fired, took his severance pay and opened a pancake house in Miami, thereafter moaning, “I’ll always be remembered as the coach of the worst team in the history of the NBA.”

Kevin Loughery got the 76ers a few wins as coach, but the team quickly reverted to previous form. “It was the loneliness of the downhill racer,” Carter said. “All we wanted to hear was that final horn. Man, if the season hadn’t ended, we’d still be losing.”

Chaney, on the other hand, is impressed with how the Clippers have continued to scrap. “It’s amazing and it’s helped me when I’ve gotten down,” he said. “They kill each other in practice, they rebound from defeat so quickly. They want to win, actually want to win. I think it’s just a matter of time, but that may be foolish optimism.”

That was before the Clippers ended the streak against Denver. What that foretells is anybody’s guess. Double figures, maybe. Playoffs, probably not.

However, it is interesting to note that the 76ers, without doing much to improve themselves in the off-season, won 25 games the next year and were a winning team two years after that.

Four seasons after the worst record in history, Philadelphia was in the NBA title series. Having proved there is only so far down you can go, it was apparently time to move up.