They’re No. 2 and Treading Water

Donald Sterling has seen it all before, so perhaps that’s why the Clipper owner picked this week to leave town, with his team playing the Lakers twice in three nights in Staples Center, the second game tonight.

The Clippers, 106-103 losers Wednesday, continue to toil in the Lakers’ considerable shadow.

Not that anybody expected anything else, but with 14 games left in the regular season and 18 games separating the teams in the Pacific Division standings, the Clippers will finish behind the Lakers for the 18th time in the 20 seasons since Sterling moved his team from San Diego.

Two years in a row the Clippers finished ahead of the Lakers, each time by two games, but that was more than 10 years ago, in the first two seasons after the Lakers’ Magic Johnson retired for the first time in 1991. In 17 other seasons, they’ve finished an average of more than 30 games behind, the all-time high a 53-game gap at the end of the 1986-87 season, when the Lakers were 65-17, the Clippers 12-70. Only once have the Clippers won the season series, taking three of five games from the Lakers in the 1992-93 season.

They are the only two NBA teams that share an arena, but similarities end there. Even Clipper home games in the series feel like Laker home games, with Laker fans filling seats that otherwise go unsold. The Clippers have attracted three sellouts this season, two against the Lakers.

“It’s very weird,” Elton Brand said after Wednesday’s Clipper home game, which drew a crowd of 19,668, about 4,000 more than the Clipper average. “I don’t want to say weird; it’s just different.

“But I understand that [the Lakers] deserve it. They’ve got the tradition; they’ve got the heritage; they’ve got the rings. Once we get that, we’ll get the fan following, we’ll get the love. And everything else too -- the respect.

“But it is different. When I played in Chicago with the Bulls, they loved you, regardless. Win, lose, draw, they were fighting for you. Now, it’s like, it was our home game, but I saw a lot of yellow in [the crowd], yellow and purple. ...

“That’s just the way it is.”

The Clippers, of course, would like to see it change. But they’ve got major obstacles to overcome, not the least of which is their own history, including a 19-75 record against the Lakers in the years they’ve shared Los Angeles.

“Nobody else’s expectations are very high, obviously,” Coach Mike Dunleavy said. “We’ve got to build our own momentum, build our own expectations.”