Who’d Have Guessed Clippers Might Last Longer Than Suns?

This bulletin in from our newsroom:

Playoff fever continues to spread through the city of Los Angeles, Calif., gripping all residents.

Film at eleven.

Lakers? Kings? Hey, make room for those little dippers the Clippers, who have outlived the Boston Celtics and the Atlanta Hawks and the Detroit Pistons and Shaquille O’Neal and, hey, who knows, might even end up outliving the Phoenix Suns.

Is this a wacky postseason or what?

On death row Wednesday night, the Clippers made an absolutely splendid and impressive--one might even say heroic--effort to defeat the Houston Rockets, 93-90, hanging on for dear life in the NBA playoffs.

“The effort we had tonight was incredible,” Ron Harper said afterward. “I was not going to let it go to waste.”

They won this game with 20 points and 13 pulldowns from manly Stanley Roberts, who did not cower in the face of one of the world’s greatest basketball players, Hakeem Olajuwon, who was pretty doggoned wonderful Wednesday night himself.

They did it with Danny Manning and Mark Jackson overcoming frightful shooting nights, with Harper hooping a team-high 21 points, a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck and with 14,710 loud customers and with the luckiest thing of all, a three-pointer by Lester Conner before halftime that was such a tricky shot, somebody should be handing him the keys to a new car.

After all, Lester’s first-half shot ended up being the difference in the game.

Ground control to Houston--incoming, incoming.

L.A.’s other team is coming in for one more landing.

The first half gave us Houston at its best and worst. Any NBA team that retreats to its locker room at halftime with 11 turnovers (bad) and eight assists (worse) is a nominee to never come out of the locker room, because the coach might very well murder everyone in the room. For those who haven’t already computed this, that’s one assist every three minutes. Passing--what a concept.

Jackson, meanwhile, volunteered to stage a free clinic. On one Clipper possession, Jackson flea-flickered a lateral behind him for two sneaky-fast points, and on the very next visit to the hoop he scoop-whipped the ball, cross-court, like a jai-alai player to a teammate on his far left flank. Two more points.

Trouble was, the Clippers often needed to do something Globetrotter-fancy just to cleanly get off a shot. The Rocket rookie, Robert Horry, and the Rocket commander, Olajuwon, amused themselves by blocking shot after shot after shot, at times taking turns like: “After you.” “No, after you .” Getting a 10-footer over Olajuwon is like getting a sunrise past a rooster.

Olajuwon stockpiled points, rebounds and blocks. Luckily for the home team, he also piled up personal fouls. This eventually evacuated the lane for Roberts as though someone had hung up a “Wet Paint” sign, and darned if the big lug didn’t take advantage of it, staying out of foul trouble himself--a minor miracle in itself--and occasionally dominating the proceedings under the hoop.

Houston’s Otis Thorpe spoke kindly of the not-yet-dead, saying: “The Clippers took care of business. Everything came through for them--especially their big man.”

Making up for the unexpected shooting inaccuracy of Manning, Roberts came up with the ultimate high-percentage shot late in the game, a gym-quaking dunk with 1:41 remaining that tied the score at 90-90. The Clippers were back in business and sensed it.

“Down the wire, I wanted the ball,” Roberts said, suddenly a hunk of burning dunk.

A minute later, ex-Clipper Winston Garland made his greatest contribution ever to the franchise that once employed him, fouling Jackson with 33 seconds to play. Jackson gagged the first free throw but bagged the second, and it was a point that turned out to be so, so, so important.

Houston went to its main man. Olajuwon got off one shot, two, but couldn’t get one to go down. Scott Brooks, the baby Anteater out of Irvine, was open for a jump shot, but knew enough to keep looking for Hakeem. He found him, but again the ball refused to go down.

When the rebound landed in Jackson’s hands, there was nothing left for Houston to do but foul and nothing more for Jackson to do but a hip-wiggling little shimmy in front of the Clipper bench that entertained the troops. Jackson then steadied himself long enough to swish two free throws and book the Clippers on a flight to Texas.

And who knows what might happen there?