Letter Rip: This Sterling Property Has to Be Gutted

April 5, 1998

Donald T. Sterling

Sterling World Plaza

Beverly Hills, Calif.

*

Dear Donald:

I hereby tender my resignation as your unpaid advisor.

I’m too discouraged to go on. Of course, my duties oblige me only to catch occasional games, so my pain is nothing compared to your long-suffering employees’.

The other night, we were asking Bill Fitch how he takes it. He said he has a closet at home with padded walls--in Clipper colors--he goes in for two hours a day. I think he was kidding.

On the hopeful side, he said he wasn’t going to do “this”--drawing a line across his throat with his finger.

Over the years, I’ve given you lots of advice: Keep your best players, move somewhere you can draw, imbue the organization with a sense of purpose, turn it over to a professional, confine your participation to signing the checks. I thought it was fundamental stuff, but you never did any of it.

I thought it was my fault. I started using shorter words and taking it one principle at a time. Like your employees, I was willing to settle for a small victory, a step in the right direction, a suggestion you heard me. My mistake.

A year ago, we discussed your chain of command. You said you had one. I thought it was more like ants at a picnic. You insisted. I wanted to know if there was a leader, who was it?

You said Fitch. I thought this was . . . unusual . . . since he’s the coach and there’s a general manager, Elgin Baylor, but Fitch had just gotten you into the playoffs. I asked if you held him in such esteem, why was he dangling on the last year of his contract?

Lo and behold, you gave him a $4-million, two-year extension, close to what you’d paid all the rest of your coaches together, making Bill the first you’d ever rehired. Since stability is positive, that seemed good.

Of course, things didn’t turn out too well after that, did they?

You let Malik Sealy go. That was OK since Brent Barry had to play. You traded Stanley Roberts. That was OK, who knew he was here?

You made Bo Outlaw a good offer, but he did the Clipper Thing and split. That was bad. You let Fitch bring in Stojko Vrankovic. Stojko’s a good athlete for a 7-foot-2, 270-pounder, but the NBA game whizzes past his nose like a Nolan Ryan fastball. Fitch just wanted to park him in the lane and see how many times the ball bounced off him. Unfortunately, Bill wasn’t the first to think of that. Vrankovic had just bombed in Minnesota where they didn’t exactly expect him to go 20-10.

Then Loy Vaught got hurt. Suddenly, everyone was young, nobody defended and, let’s face it, they didn’t always try their very best. That’s a talent-filled young roster you’ve got, on an 18-win pace. It’s a little hard to pinpoint just when their bellies rolled upward but it seems to have been sometime between Nov. 15 and March 15.

Players grumbled about Fitch, although they were smart enough not to do it publicly because the old T. rex would have been on their necks in a second. The front office was distressed.

Of course, I’ve seen that number before. Your players don’t like your coaches because they’re too hard (Gene Shue, Mike Schuler, Fitch), too easy (Don Chaney, Don Casey, Bob Weiss) or passing through at too high a rate of speed (Larry Brown). Sometimes, they even meet with you to discuss it, as in the case of Casey. Coach gets thrown over the side. After a brief honeymoon, they start in on his successor.

Fitch has won an NBA title, built two other contenders and retains some credibility. The coaches aren’t the problem, nor the administrators or players. It’s you.

I know you’ve been in a funk. Everyone said you had a young team on the rise, you shelled out for your coach and look what happened.

Unfortunately, we’re way past the days when nice, incremental-type moves change much. If you want to know what you’re doing wrong, it’s everything. If you want to know what you have to change, the answer is the same.

In the old days, you could keep your players for six years while they plotted their escapes. Under this collective bargaining agreement, you get three years, or in real terms, 2 1/2 (see Barry, B.).

If players don’t think you’re serious, they’ll leave--one reason you’ve never retained a free agent. Being human, they may depart spiritually before they do in fact.

I know you have a lot of hope for Isaac Austin, but I have to tell you, he hasn’t looked so sunny lately. He recently noted, “Me and my agent are just trying to finish the season strong,” adding, “You can’t get down because you’ve been traded or traded to a bad situation.”

That “bad situation” he’s talking about is your team.

“I mean, if you’re losing and you’re not used to losing, and you come from a winning situation, yeah, it’s going to be discouraging to you,” Austin was saying the other night.

“You never know, next year there could be a lot of changes around here, open up a lot of opportunities for everyone.”

Personally, I think he’s just being polite for the sake of leverage and will take his $8 million a year somewhere it doesn’t come with 64 losses. If you haven’t noticed, each departure makes the next one more likely, which isn’t good for you, not with Rodney Rogers, Lorenzen Wright and Lamond Murray free to go in 1999 and Maurice Taylor in 2000.

It takes a certain genius to turn a franchise in Los Angeles, a city players love to visit and, in the case of the Lakers, play in, into a black hole, but you’ve got it.

It doesn’t matter what you do if you don’t change everything. What’s the difference if you move to Anaheim or the Staples Center if you’re going to stink on toast? If you’d gone to the Pond two years ago, as most of your organization wanted to, you’d have turned off a whole new county by now.

You’ve had good players and coaches. Respected men like Alan Rothenberg, Carl Scheer, Pete Babcock, Arn Tellem and Harley Frankel have passed through your front office. You let everyone cancel everyone else out and did what you felt most comfortable with: nothing. Sitting tight may work in California real estate, but it’s a non-starter here.

You can’t keep doing this hand-wringing I-just-want-to-win act. The truth is, as long as you can sit in the front row with celebrities around you, knowing this distressed property you got for $10 million is worth $125 million and the boys from Fox and Disney are wooing you, you think you’re doing something right.

Whew!

Thanks for letting me vent.

I’ve been hanging around so long, I’m starting to think like Clipper employees. Like them, I reserve the right to quit at night and return the next morning.

No, I’m not quitting. What, and give up two easy columns a year? I can hardly wait to see what you do next, even if I think I already know.

Your faithful advisor,

Mark

FACES AND FIGURES

Playing the feud: For the Lakers, the good news is they’re so good at payback when someone like the New Jersey Nets or Utah Jazz upsets them. The bad news is, they didn’t play as hard the first time. . . . That’s what you get for asking for input: Michigan rehired Coach Brian Ellerbe after Robert “Tractor” Traylor said he hadn’t come to play for three coaches. Traylor then announced he was turning pro. . . . USA Basketball officials privately say Kobe Bryant isn’t a lock to be named to this summer’s World Cup team, after all. Tim Duncan will get one of the two remaining spots. The other is now expected to go to Tim Hardaway. . . . Golden State Warrior players continue to grumble about P.J. Carlesimo’s tactics, such as not double-teaming on defense--which Carlesimo learned from assistant Dick Harter, who taught it to Pat Riley in New York and now employs it under Larry Bird in Indiana. This suggests Carlesimo will have all he can do to last another season on the sideline. Center Erick Dampier, asked what it would be like to play against a Carlesimo-type defense: “Oh, that would be great.” . . . Net Coach John Calipari, to a referee during last week’s loss to the Boston Celtics: “I think you guys came here tonight and decided you were going to get me.” Ref: “Don’t flatter yourself. Your name never came up.”