Clippers Must Put Up or Players Won’t Shut Up

The Clippers’ biggest challenge is more difficult to deal with than Shaq in the low post or Stockton to Malone on the pick-and-roll. They’re battling their own history, their culture, the stigma of the franchise.

They haven’t won anything. They haven’t done anything to make a long-term commitment to the future. And until they do they’ll be susceptible to the type of external criticisms they get on a daily basis and even the internal blast they received from Michael Olowokandi this week.

Maybe the Clippers’ reaction--they hit Olowokandi with a $50,000 fine Friday--shows that they’re ready to change. But unless they step up and spend some money of their own, the only precedent they’ve set is that players now will have to pay for their remarks ... because the shots will keep on coming.

Agents doubt that owner Donald Sterling will come up with the loot to keep this team together. Players around the league doubt it. And, apparently, so do the players within the team’s locker room.

Don’t underestimate the role a good reputation plays in the world of free agency. It helped the Lakers attract and retain the right complementary pieces to help Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant win two championships (not to mention Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s five titles before them). It’s helped the San Antonio Spurs remain in the upper echelon of the league despite their small-market location.

The Clippers--a team players always seem to leave, with hope following them out the door--don’t get that credit. Olowokandi hit on that when the Clippers lost at Utah Wednesday, a game that threw the dirt on their season after a home loss to Utah four days earlier lowered their coffin into the ground.

“Players are playing for themselves because they’re very uncertain of their future with this team,” Olowokandi said. “That’s a fact.

“Whenever you have a group of guys that are very uncertain of their futures on the team that will always happen. Whenever you have that situation, you will never have a basketball team. Not this year, not next year, not 10 years from now.”

Olowokandi will be a restricted free agent this summer, point guard Jeff McInnis will be an unrestricted free agent, and Elton Brand, Lamar Odom and Corey Maggette are eligible for contract extensions.

The Chicago Bulls, Cleveland Cavaliers and Washington Wizards are the only teams that will be far enough below the projected salary cap of $42 million to offer significant money to Olowokandi. The Clippers can retain him if they match the offer, which they’re expected to do.

The only automatic is to offer Brand the maximum contract extension, more than $80 million for six years. If they can’t do that for a guy who can give them a steady 18 and 10, hold his own with all the great power forwards in the Western Conference and match up with any player in the character department, they’ll never do it.

I’d make trading Maggette the top priority this summer. If he shoots almost every time he touches the ball now, imagine how he’d be in a contract year.

I wouldn’t be in such a rush to move Odom, but I also wouldn’t max him out after a season in which he battled injuries and his continued off-court troubles.

McInnis has clashed with Coach Alvin Gentry and he’s not always the best teammate. But he’s given the Clippers what they need at the point this season and come through in the clutch for a couple of games. He’s done it all on the $590,850 salary the Clippers picked up when they could have let him become a free agent and renegotiated with him.

It’s such account-friendly, goodwill-lacking moves that created this environment. Olowokandi merely commented on it.

However, he wasn’t the best spokesman.

The Clippers have had Olowokandi’s back from the giddy-up. They said they believed in him even when he was derided as one of the worst No. 1 picks ever.

They didn’t hang him out there when he was arrested on domestic violence charges in December, a case that was later dropped after the accuser recanted the charges.

He’s finally rewarded them with real NBA center play the past three months. He’s aggressive and he’s developed into their best low-post option. When he shoots, you actually believe the ball has a good chance to go in.

But it’s interesting that this didn’t happen until he was in his contract year. And now he’s authorized to call out the organization? And then follow it up by missing a team meeting the next morning?

What Olowokandi and the other Clipper players have to realize is that they’ll never get anything they seek if they don’t play their best wherever they happen to be.

“The free agents that become valuable are the guys that play on winning teams,” Gentry said.

General Manager Elgin Baylor wanted to make a statement. The fine was his call.

If this signals a new era, that the Clippers are tired of people trashing the organization, then good for Baylor. Now he and Sterling have to get it right at the negotiating table.

As Gentry said, “We will be judged by what happens between July and August.”

That’s how we’ll remember this season.

Even though they won’t make the playoffs, 2001-02 wasn’t a failure. It was disappointing, a letdown even--kind of like the episodes of E! network’s “Wild On” when Jules Asner hosts instead of Brooke Burke--but it still marked progress.

Simply splitting their last six games would give them a nine-game improvement over last year--and would mark a jump from 15 victories to 40 in two seasons.

Letting the core of this team move on would take them back to the same old spot, leaving them as the same old Clippers.

They insist things are different now. Fining players who open their mouths can’t be the only change.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at: j.a.adande@latimes.com