Loss, Brand’s Injury Add to Clipper Stress

The hits keep coming for the Clippers, who don’t look as if they can take much more of their disastrous 2002-03 season. They lost another game and another player Friday. What else is new?

The Portland Trail Blazers defeated the reeling Clippers, 109-103, at the Rose Garden, with Scottie Pippen scoring 24 points and Zach Randolph adding a career-best 21 points and 12 rebounds.

Lamar Odom scored 23 points for the Clippers, losers of four consecutive games.

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, tests revealed power forward Elton Brand has a stress fracture just above his left ankle. Brand, the team’s leading scorer, rebounder and shot blocker, told the team he will attempt to play through the injury.

It’s uncertain how often Brand can play or how effective he can be during the final 24 games, including tonight against the Seattle SuperSonics at Staples Center. He sat out Friday and during Wednesday’s loss against the Golden State Warriors.

Brand probably couldn’t have saved the Clippers from themselves Friday, when they suffered their 13th loss in the last 16 games. Since the Christmas break, the last-place Clippers are 7-22. Their overall record is 19-38.

The Clippers lost for the 20th time this season when holding a fourth-quarter lead. It wasn’t much -- only four points at its widest -- but the Clippers failed to hold it, and the Trail Blazers never trailed after Derek Anderson’s three-point basket gave them a 92-90 lead with 5:12 to play.

“It’s one of those things,” Coach Alvin Gentry said when asked about Brand’s injury. “I’m not going to get into whether he’ll be ready for this game or that game. It’s one of those things where it will depend on how much pain he can tolerate.”

Brand, averaging 18.4 points, 11.2 rebounds and 2.6 blocks in 53 games, had been nursing the injury for some time. When Shaquille O’Neal bowled him over with a late dunk in the Clippers’ loss Tuesday to the Lakers, Brand returned to the bench and told Gentry, “I think I really messed it up.”

“It’s been one of those seasons, and they can happen in this league,” Gentry said. “The first thing I told our guys at the shoot-around this morning was that we’re going to play hard and finish out the season. We’re going to play as hard as hell, and we’ll never have a season like this again.

“I can’t imagine what else can happen. I don’t think there’s a guy on this team who hasn’t started this season. Well, I guess [Wang Zhizhi] hasn’t.”

Cherokee Parks replaced Brand for the second consecutive game, scoring nine points and taking nine rebounds.

Parks was matched up against Randolph rather than Rasheed Wallace, who sat out because of a sore left Achilles’ tendon.

Parks, who has spent most of the season on the injured list because of various nagging injuries closely related, it would appear, to the team’s desire to have other players on the active roster, started for the first time Wednesday, when he had five points and four rebounds.