A Bad Start Doesn’t Mean a Bad Future

Not in their house?

Hey, who knew the Clippers had a house?

Staples Center belongs to the Kings and is identified with the Lakers, so in this sparkling new venue, the Clippers are only renters. Nevertheless, it’s here that Alvin Gentry, the latest coach of the NBA’s most woebegone franchise, intends to make a stand.

Well, eventually, anyway.

“Before you do anything in the NBA, you have to win at home,” Gentry said Thursday night before his exciting, young players went out and lost to the older, more experienced--well, compared to the Clippers--Vancouver Grizzlies.

“I think there were only five or six teams that had winning records on the road in the whole NBA last year so obviously, home court becomes such a big, big thing so you have to establish yourself at home. Once you do that, then you can worry about winning on the road.

“I think one of the things that we have to do here as a team, especially with our young guys, we’ve got to play with enthusiasm and we’ve got to play with intensity. And I think that’s basically what the fans are looking for right now from us.

“I don’t think they expect us to be any big winners or anything like that but I think they expect when they come out here for us to play like it’s the last game of the year and we’ve got a chance to get home-court advantage.”

And that’s just what happened.

The Clippers were exciting in flashes, such as when 19-year-old Darius Miles turned Michael Dickerson into as pillar of salt, whooshing past him on a first-quarter drive as if he were a statue, going in for a layup.

They fought to the end, cutting a 20-point lead to five in the waning moments, getting the crowd on its feet and forcing the Grizzlies to call a timeout.

Of course, before that, the Clippers were kids against men. They started a 19-year-old and a 20-year-old. They had a total of 13 years’ experience in the starting lineup, including three for point guard Jeff McInnis, who bounced around the league for the first two.

The Grizzlies, who are young enough themselves, at least had 17 years’ experience among their starters, and in between the Clipper flashes, the grownups controlled the game. Miles might have posterized Dickerson but when the night was done, the Vancouver guard had 20 points and the Clipper kid had 15.

It was just another opening another show . . . Clipper-style.

They had the searchlights casting beams into the sky, a band playing on the (empty) sidewalk in front of Staples, the fog machine (5-foot-5 Earl Boykins, who is on the injured list, almost got lost when he was introduced), the starters running out between flaming torches.

Before the game, Gentry took the microphone, welcomed the crowd, telling the fans, “We want you to be a part of this young Clipper team.”

It took a while but the Clippers finally got the fans into the game, late in the fourth quarter.

Of course, Clipper fans are known for their patience. There may not be that many of them but the few they have are legends for their patience.

“We played with a lot of effort,” said Gentry afterward. “I think we’ve just got to understand the way we played the second half was the way we’ve got to play the whole 48 minutes.”

This isn’t the same dead-head Clipper team that stunk out Staples last season. That team was talented but built around two departing players, Maurice Taylor and Derek Anderson, and it quit early, like mid-November.

This one has even more talent . . . and is even younger. In addition, it’s playing in a Western Conference so strong, you wonder who the Clippers are going to beat. That was last season’s No. 13 finisher in the West that beat them Thursday night.

Barring a transfer to the Eastern Conference . . . or the Pacific 10 . . . the Clippers are in trouble, but then, is that supposed to surprise anyone around here?

So the Clippers came out and grabbed a 20-point deficit, after which the game began to flow up and down, their depth and athleticism started to tell and they turned garbage time back into a game late in the fourth quarter.

Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day, to say nothing of Clipperdom, where they’re still trying to lay the foundation.