Sterling Refutation

Now for another in our series of “Biggest Games in Clippers History

They come one after another these days, each bigger than the last and none bigger than tonight’s Game 5 with the franchise at its high-water mark. Only once in its history has it reached this point, when the Buffalo Braves went to Boston tied, 2-2, in their East semifinal series.

It was April 30, 1976. The president was Gerald Ford. “All the Presidents’ Men” won the Academy Award.

The Braves lost, 99-88, to the Celtics, who would close them out two days later in Buffalo and go on to win the NBA title. The next day, Coach Jack Ramsay resigned in a dispute with temperamental owner Paul Snyder, a rich Nabisco investor also known as “the Cookie Monster.”

Snyder tried to sell the team to a group from Hollywood, Fla., but Buffalo got an injunction barring a move. Snyder began selling off the individual parts, including 1975 MVP Bob McAdoo, who was traded along with forward Jim McMillian for Knicks reserve John Gianelli and cash.

I know, sometimes it seems like nothing ever really changes.

The Braves fell to 30-52 the next season. A season after that, they dropped to 27-55, and in the spring of 1978, Snyder sold them to John Y. Brown ... who then traded franchises with the owners of the Celtics, who had fallen on hard times with John Havlicek about to retire and Dave Cowens leaving for 20 games to drive a cab.

I swear I’m not making this up. With this league, you don’t have to.

The Braves’ new owners moved them to San Diego, renamed them the Clippers and endured three seasons of downward spiral, including Bill Walton trying to come back from foot surgery and World B. Free firing at will, before selling the team to Donald T. Sterling in 1981.

Sterling paid $13 million but it was actually $2 million plus $10 million of deferred salaries. According to his old press agent, the former owners threw in $100,000 of season-ticket deposits so, in effect, Sterling got a signing bonus.

So you can’t blame The Donald for the whole mess. Just the part since 1984, when he moved them to Los Angeles.

The Clippers never got back to the playoffs until 1992 under Larry Brown, by which time they had been here for eight seasons, and you know the rest.

Nevertheless, in real life, things do change, just not as often as it seems.

The Clippers are now reinventing themselves before our eyes, although it started years ago when Sterling moved his vagabonds into Staples Center, Elgin Baylor assembled a promising talent base, fans started coming and Mike Dunleavy arrived at exactly the right time to be empowered to put it all together, if Sterling was ever going to empower anyone.

The moment is not only unprecedented in their time here but bursting with promise, all their lost yesterdays and hopeful tomorrows converging in the single person of Sam Cassell, their Game 4 hero.

Cassell hasn’t been a Clipper for a year yet and when he heard that he had been traded to them last summer, he had the usual reaction: No, please, anything but that!

For Cassell, the greatest little cold-blooded big-shot maker who ever played for seven teams in 13 seasons, it was like the crowning indignity.

“I didn’t really want to be part of this whole makeup,” he says. “I wasn’t sure if the Clipper organization wanted to win. I didn’t know, you know what I’m saying?

“But I took my physical and Mike met me in the Marina and we just talked, you know? We had a two-hour conversation and I just felt his vibe.

“He said to me, ‘Sam, it can start with you. Here’s the ball. We have this, we have that. We lost 18 or 19 games in the last five minutes by four or five points.... ‘

“I knew they had Elton Brand, Chris Kaman, Corey Maggette, they added Cuttino Mobley -- and [Dunleavy] wasn’t done. He said he’s going to be aggressive.

“So my next question to him was, ‘Is management backing you to sign a guy for a certain amount of money?’

“He was like, ‘I told them if we’re going to win, they’re going to have to be behind me.’

“Once we got that clear, I felt good leaving L.A., more than I did going to it. So in training camp, I saw the pieces we had, you know, Shaun Livingston, Quinton Ross. We had a lot of guys who understand their role on this ballclub and I was like, ‘OK, it can work.’ ”

The certain guy Cassell was asking about was, of course, himself. Now eager to stay, he has said that at 36, he’d be happy with a two-year deal. With Sterling having just announced “There is no shortage of money” to The Times’ T.J. Simers, this should be child’s play.

To see how the Clippers handle it, tune in this summer, but it has worked exactly as planned.

At this level, the Clippers are very young, with half their rotation making its playoff debut, but they have gotten a handle on Phoenix’s devastating pick-and-roll, holding Steve Nash to six for 20 from the field in Games 3 and 4.

In the ongoing chess match, Dunleavy is now posting up the diminutive Nash with Maggette, Cassell or Vladimir Radmanovic, rather than letting Suns Coach Mike D’Antoni hide him covering Ross.

The Suns say the Clippers have decided to take Nash’s shooting away by double teaming him, so he’s moving the ball as he’s supposed to and the other Suns have to make their shots.

Nevertheless, it’s clear the Clippers are wearing Nash down. Asked after Game 4 whether he was OK, his answer was, “Yeah, more or less. I’m doing fine.”

At this level, a comer has to show it can live up to the moment, something the Clippers didn’t do consistently this season, or even often.

It’s been a long time since they had a moment like this. Thirty years later, they’re finally going back down to that crossroads.