Nothing Is Sterling for This Ford

By BILL PLASCHKE

Dec. 15, 1999 12 AM PT

Sometimes nobody needs to say it, sometimes you can just see it.

Even in a tunnel, even 90 minutes before tipoff, for teetering Clipper Coach Chris Ford, Tuesday was one of those times.

Leaning against a wall in the bowels of the Superstore, smiling and waxing lyrical for the media, was Laker Coach Phil Jackson.

A rumpled Ford walked briskly in front of him.

His rumpled center Keith Closs, still in street clothes, walked past Ford in the other direction.

“You’re late,” Ford said.

“I got a ticket!” Closs said, pulling out a yellow slip of paper.

Ford shook his head and kept walking.

Closs shook his head and kept walking.

Jackson smiled and kept waxing.

Later sitting only 50 feet from each other, rarely have the two coaches in this town seemed further apart.

Jackson, whose Lakers beat the Clippers, 95-68, Tuesday night, looks as if he could be here forever.

Ford, who has been here only a season longer, would not be surprised if he is gone tomorrow.

“If they come in here tomorrow and say thanks, I would just say thanks and go back to my family,” he said. “If somebody doesn’t think I’m doing a good enough job, well, I’ve got a great family.”

Right on time, another Clipper coach has one foot on a losing streak and another one out the door.

All of 72 games into his tenure, Ford has seemingly already been cast adrift by his players and bosses, destined to spend his remaining days here among flotsam that once answered to names like Bob Weiss and Mike Schuler.

Ford is a great guy; honest, friendly, the sort for whom you would gladly pull up a stool.

But Ford is not getting enough out of this team’s best young talent in years.

And if Tuesday was any indication, that talent has seemingly already tuned him out.

Three points in the second quarter? Nineteen points in one half? NBA records for both?

“Something’s wrong,” Magic Johnson said to observers at halftime.

Clipper fans--well, OK, both of them--are crying for the coach’s job.

Team officials, anxious over a poor start that has already emptied the new arena’s top deck on occasion, probably will not pick up the option on his contract this spring.

But history says that owner Donald Sterling is too cheap to fire Ford before he gets his full-season’s, $1-million worth.

So there the nice guy drifts, caught between his perceived coaching weaknesses and the Clippers’ very real organizational weaknesses that seemingly stymie his chances of improvement.

So he doesn’t devise schemes to fit the player’s ability?

Ford doesn’t need to mention that he is working with only one full-time assistant who only coaches, which equals the fewest in the league, and is three fewer than the Lakers. “We are living and breathing basketball trying to get this fixed,” he said, referring to assistant Jim Todd.

That is not an overstatement. With both of their families back East, Ford and Todd actually live together in Redondo Beach.

They have a big-screen TV, and a satellite dish, and every night off at home, they are sitting on their couches by 4:30 p.m.

Every night they are watching basketball, pausing only to run down to a restaurant to pick up Styrofoam boxes of food.

“We watch the games until there are no more games,” Todd said. “Then we put in a one of our game tapes and watch some more.”

So Ford’s players often seem confused and out of position?

He is right to mention that, considering last year was a lost cause with a team full of players who wanted to leave, he’s really had this group for only six weeks.

“They are talented, yes, but they are young and in search of their identity,” Ford said. “Just the other day, we had to spend an entire hour just going over our rotation defensively, step by step. We spend a lot of time doing those things.”

But, well, in the NBA, six weeks can often be a lifetime. Or at least, a career.

“This is the time in the NBA when everyone feels something could happen with coaching changes,” Jackson said, not speaking of Ford specifically. “You have been with your team a good spell, a quarter of the season is over, teams are showing what they have done and are capable of doing.”

What the Clippers have done--five wins in 22 games--seems far from what they are capable of doing.

They have the league’s best rookie. They have one of the league’s brightest young power forwards. They have an overall first-round draft pick at center. They have an emerging young shooting guard.

Yet before Tuesday, they were among the bottom three in the league in points and field-goal percentage, while ranking dead last in assists and fouling out.

Despite a 10-year playing career marked by scrappiness, despite a winning record in seven previous coaching seasons before arriving here last year, Ford’s teams have shown little of that here.

He was hired only eight days before his first season here last winter in Sterling’s unconscionable attempt to save money at the fans’ expense. But fair or not, his 14-58 record here would indicate that he has never quite caught up.

“Hey, I knew it was going to be a challenge, and I haven’t backed down from that,” he said. “All I want is a fair shake. Just give me a fair shake.”

He says he will keep fighting for that fairness, refusing to walk out on what is increasingly an untenable situation.

“All my years in basketball, I have learned, you define a nucleus, and you keep that nucleus together,” Ford said. “Sure I want to stay here. You can’t have a revolving door and expect to win. I think we have a chance to get better here. I want to be a part of it.”

If only it didn’t seem as if he was the only one.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.

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DOWNWARD SPIRAL

How the last five Clipper coaches have fared:

.409

MIKE SCHULER, 1990-91; 54-75

.547

LARRY BROWN, 1991-93; 64-53

.329

BOB WEISS, 1993-94; 27-55

.302