Blake Griffin was a cultural phenomenon for the LA Clippers, but not for the reason you might think

A player’s impact on sports culture can best be measured by the moments that come to mind when his name is mentioned.

The best basketball players have them: Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and so forth.

For LA Clippers forward Blake Griffin, who announced his retirement on Tuesday after 14 years, when his name is mentioned, many moments come to mind: “Lob City.” Dipping over the Kia. Blake’s face. Straight up baptizing Boston Celtics center Kendrick Perkins. Former LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling.

The Sterling saga that began in April 2014 when Sterling was recorded on tape saying that it bothered him that his mistress brought black men to “his games.” is a blip on Griffin’s profession radar. In 2009, he was the No. 1 overall pick by the Clippers. Winner of the Rookie of the Year award in 2011. In Griffin’s seven full seasons with the Clippers, they made the playoffs in all but one yr.

But Griffin and his teammates protest against Sterling before Game 4 of the first round playoff series against the Golden State Warriors following the public release of his comments, it is probably the most lasting legacy of an illustrious profession marked by the extraordinary highs and typical lows of talented superstars who never achieve off-season success.

Griffin’s partnership with guard Chris Paul made the Clippers relevant again and, more importantly, cool again. Between the Clippers’ move to Los Angeles in 1984 and Griffin’s election in 2009, the team made the playoffs only 4 times, never winning 50 or more games. From 2010-11 to 2016-17, Griffin’s last full season in Los Angeles, they won a minimum of 50 games five times.

The success of the Lob City era legitimized the Clippers franchise to the point where two things happened. After NBA commissioner Adam Silver banned Sterling from the league for life, the team was sold to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for $2 billion in May 2014, at the time the largest team sale in NBA history. Griffin also turned the recalcitrant Clippers into a place where All-Stars like Kawhi Leonard, Paul George and James Harden would play. “We were the old Clippers,” Griffin wrote in The Players Tribune in 2014. “We were a joke in the eyes of the media back then. They just desired to laugh at us.”

You can argue his Hall of Fame bona fides all you want, but Griffin is a very important piece of NBA history. He was involved in a landmark moment in Los Angeles that influenced followers. “Dunk City” doesn’t have the same impact, does it?

As the game evolved — and as he got older and multiple lower-body injuries began to build up — Griffin did, too. When he entered the league in 2009, it was still a league of giants. He relied on his athleticism to play off the rim in addition to anyone in the league. Joining Griffin in warmups was the equivalent of throwing a fastball to Barry Bonds or facing Derrick Henry right at the line of scrimmage. It was a senseless endeavor.

But by the time Griffin was shockingly traded to the Detroit Pistons in 2018, there wasn’t much left in the knees. Like the remainder of the league, Griffin moved behind the three-point line. From the 2010-11 to 2016-17 season, Griffin shot 29.9% on 0.6 three-point attempts per game. From 2017-18 to 2022-23, he shot 33.4% on 4.7 attempts per game. He hasn’t grow to be Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, but he has grow to be a stretch-4 who can shoot reliably from deep. Many big players didn’t last in the league when the need for more three-point shooting arose. Griffin prospered.

However, he achieved most of this under Sterling, whose teams normally recorded the lowest attendances in the league. Sterling is understood to have been prejudiced against black people, as illustrated by a federal housing discrimination lawsuit, for, amongst other things, his claim that his black tenants “smell and attract vermin.” Former team general manager and Hall of Fame player Elgin Baylor alleged in the lawsuit that Sterling told him he wanted a roster composed of “poor black boys from the South” and a white head coach. Sterling settled a housing discrimination lawsuit, and a jury ruled in his favor in Baylor’s suit.

After the Clippers drafted Griffin, Sterling paraded him around a swanky party at his mansion as if Griffin was his best ox, continuously prodding his newest black worker to speak about his sexual prowess.

Griffin said he felt powerless at the time because he was only 20 years old and interacting together with his supervisor. The power imbalance is a harbinger of silence because Sterling has been allowed to operate this manner for a long time. “This guy was my boss” – Griffin – wrote in “The Players Tribune”. six months after the Sterling tape was revealed. “Ask yourself, how would you react if your boss did the same to you?”

After Sterling’s tapes were released in 2014, in the middle of the team’s series against the Warriors, Griffin and his teammates had the weight of the world on their backs. The owner of the team they played for was caught saying racist things, but all the pressure appeared to be on him. They needed to boycott. They needed to demand a takeover of Sterling. They needed to take all the risk while the audience got to enjoy the reward of Sterling leaving.

Instead of refusing to play the fourth game of the series, the players took off their warmup shirts, turned them inside out to cover the team logo, and walked to midcourt to throw all of them into a pile. It wasn’t exactly on the front lines of the protest — Griffin said he was one among the players who advocated for a boycott of a Warriors game — but as I recall, it was one among the few times the team stood as much as team owner. Sterling would not survive what he said on those tapes, but swinging around like that in public still carries risks.

Five years before the release of Sterling’s tapes, Griffin was too afraid to ask his boss to stop touching and grabbing him at an all-white party, but here he was together with his teammates and principally told Sterling to kick rocks.

“We tried to decide what to do, but everyone said we should boycott, we shouldn’t play.” Griffin told ESPN in 2019. “The idea was: OK, we didn’t play for him in any respect. We didn’t get together before the jump ball and say, “Donald Sterling three-pointer!” One two Three!’ “

The Clippers’ demonstration followed in the footsteps of the Miami Heat in hoodies following the 2012 murder of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, further illustrating that when NBA players talk, people have to listen. The Clippers’ response, in fact, resulted in Sterling’s ouster, but it also showed that players have some power in the NBA: eight years later, after an ESPN investigation found that then-Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver had made racist and sexist comments, players like the Los Angeles Laker LeBron James (“Misogyny, sexism and racism has no place in any workplace”) and Suns guard Paul (“I was and am horrified and disappointed by what I read”) expressed their dissatisfaction. Sarver sold the team in 2022.

“It was a sign of respect,” Griffin told ESPN in a 2019 article. “At the end of the day, that is what it’s all about. It’s respect for the human race. It was just a small incident that was in a position to spark something much greater and produce understanding to the issue.

“I always come back to the idea that it takes a very educated and thoughtful person to be able to hold a thought without accepting it.”