For Clippers, bad isn’t good, but worse would be better

The Clippers can’t even lose correctly.

If they’re not going to ascend, the least they could do is nosedive. Instead they’re just trudging along into the worst region of the NBA, that seedy border town at the bottom of the playoffs or the low end of the lottery odds, probably out of Greg Oden-Kevin Durant range.

This isn’t a new development for them. As bad as they’ve been historically, they’ve never been consistently horrendous at the right times to get the right players.

There’s a stat that was trotted out when the Boston Celtics’ 18-game losing streak hit 15. The last three teams with 15-game losing streaks wound up with the No. 1 pick in the draft. The Clippers were noticeably absent from that list.

Didn’t they have a monster losing streak during that period? Not quite long enough, it turns out. They had a 13-game losing streak near the end of the 2003-04 season, part of a skid in which they dropped 18 of their final 20 games. The Clippers finished 28-54 that season, but Orlando was 21-61 and wound up with the No. 1 pick in the draft lottery.

The Magic selected Dwight Howard. The Clippers picked fourth and selected Shaun Livingston.

Fast-forward to today, and the current issue of ESPN magazine sums it up best. Howard is on the cover, anointed as the newest “Next.” Inside is a story on Livingston and how everyone -- including Livingston himself -- is waiting for him to finally live up to his potential.

At the time we didn’t realize the effect that lottery would have on the future of the Clippers. They could have planted Howard at center next to Elton Brand and had one of the top frontlines in the NBA, regardless of who played small forward.

But these being the Clippers, you wonder if they would have made the wrong call and selected Emeka Okafor instead of Howard. Mike Dunleavy has been granted more personnel input than any other coach under Donald Sterling, and that’s not a good thing.

You want Dunleavy the coach, not the executive. He coaxed a past-its-prime Lakers team to the NBA Finals in his first coaching gig. But when he held both coaching and general manager duties with the Milwaukee Bucks, the team never had a winning record in his four years there. When he was just a coach in Portland, he came within a quarter of the Finals despite the combustible collection of players Bob Whitsitt had assembled on a roster that was long on talent but short on character, leadership and go-to guys.

The Clippers’ loss to Indiana on Sunday was a reminder of one of Dunleavy’s personnel gaffes. Danny Granger was on the board when the Clippers had the 12th pick in the 2005 draft, but because of Dunleavy’s fixation on Yaroslav Korolev, the Clippers took the Russian teenager. Granger went to the Pacers and has contributed much more than Korolev. Even when Granger was taken to the hospital following a hard fall Sunday, the nine points he’d scored before leaving were three times as many as Korolev has for the season.

But the move that might hamper the Clippers the most is the four-year contract extension Dunleavy signed. If things don’t improve on a roster loaded with locked-in players, will Sterling want to fire Dunleavy and keep paying him more than $5 million a year through 2011?

We didn’t think this would even be a question after the Clippers had their best postseason. The NBA works that way now. In the last few years we’ve seen the Pistons, Heat, Nets and Lakers change coaches within a year of advancing to the conference finals or beyond.

Dunleavy’s already inhibiting one key player: Corey Maggette. His refusal to play Maggette more is keeping one of the top scoring threats off the court and isn’t helping the cause of a team that ranks 19th in the NBA in points per game.

For what it’s worth, according to 82games.com the most effective Clippers lineup has been Livingston, Brand, Maggette, Cuttino Mobley and Tim Thomas, with a plus/minus of plus 38.

With 10 days until the trading deadline, sending Maggette off won’t cure the Clippers’ woes, either. When it comes to providing the spark that Chris Kaman needs, shipping Maggette would be about as effective as Kaman’s haircut. It wouldn’t help Sam Cassell pull out of his worst shooting season since the 1999 lockout year. It wouldn’t remind the rest of the players to keep pounding the ball in to Brand.

Brand, even if he isn’t up to his career-best play of last season, is still good enough to give the Clippers a shot at winning games. Which, given their current position, might not be such a good thing.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read more by Adande go to latimes.com/adandeblog.