called Honey, the team will set aside 50 to 200 tickets before
each home game, price them at $10 each and sell them to red-
and-blue-clad fans outside Staples, under the tenet that Clips
games shouldn’t only be accessible to the financially secure.
When the Clippers re-signed Beverley in early July, Leon-
ard took notice. So did another player who wasn’t even on
the market.
“As the season wound down,” Frank says, “we were very
transparent that Kawhi was going to be our No. 1 target.”
Frank sent staffers—even Ballmer—to Raptors games to
make the team’s interest apparent as much as to scout. “We
locked in, and we weren’t hiding it.”
When the time came to meet with Leonard and his family,
Frank was heartened to learn that “Kawhi loved our guys. He
went through each player, he knew their games.” Afterward,
though, the Clippers were forced to sweat out Leonard’s
meeting with the Lakers while formulating their own Plan B.
It was three straight days of takeout and coffee orders,
with Frank, Winger and the rest of the back office holing up
until two in the morning, then returning at six after dash-
ing to their respective homes in the South
Bay area to shower. “The back-and-forth,
the phone calls, the different conversa-
tions to keep everyone in the loop,” Frank
recalls. “We had our whole front office in
this little room, at some point I think the
air conditioning didn’t work, it’s sweaty
as s---, then there’s a f---ing earthquake,
the building is shaking, [we’re] talking
to Steve, talking to Doc, talking to Jerry,
getting everyone’s input... .”
Finally, Leonard let them know that they
didn’t just have a deal; George wanted
in too. The Clippers’ back office pieced
together a trade with Oklahoma City, and
fast. The end result, says Frank, “was un-
believable excitement and joy, but then you
have the pain of having to call Shai”—who
had played brilliantly in 82 games as a
rookie—“and Shai’s mom, Charmaine.
And we had to tell Gallo [forward Danilo
Gallinari]” that he’d be joining Gilgeous-
Alexander in Oklahoma City.
“Here’s Shai, he’s a 20-year-old, we never
thought we’d trade him, but he’s like, ‘You
traded me for Paul George? Yeah, I get that.
It’s Paul George.’ ”
It was the final, critical step in a three-
year expedition. “You want to make sure
everything is handled the right way,” says
Frank, “managing the information, letting
people know in the right order, at the right
time. One thing our group prided itself on
is that none of our stuff got out.Durant would score 50 points in the Game 6 clincher, but
the Clippers’ rotation, which featured the likes of Temple
and Jerome Robinson, had not only hung with the defend-
ing champs, it had taken two games from them. Despite
their elimination, those six games amounted to a Clippers
ad campaign aimed at the best players in the league. We’re
some dogs. Join us.
Something else happened during that series. Winger, the
Clippers’ limelight-averse GM, declined to interview for
the president of basketball ops position in Minnesota. The
reason, says the Ohioan turned Angeleno, was that “there’s
a sense of responsibility that comes with being added to this
group.... Our front office was passionate and humble, and
wanted to be a part of something special. They wanted theirsays Gillian Zucker, the Clippers’ president
of business operations (and Ballmer’s first
hire when he assumed ownership in 2014).
The mayor asked the Clippers to help. City
hall had ordered an audit of every pub-
lic basketball facility in L.A., indoor and
outdoor, to determine their condition. The
results “came in these gigantic binders,”
Zucker says. “I wrote up a memo and gave
[the binders] to Steve. He was headed out
on a flight somewhere.
“When he landed, he called me and
said, ‘Let’s do them all.’ ” Today there are
around 150 courts throughout greater L.A.
that have new rims, new flooring and an
interlocked lac in the center circle, and
by the end of 2020 there will be 348.
The Clippers have also bankrolled a
mobile optometry shop that shows up at
local schools to test kids’ vision and fit
them with glasses. “More than 30% of kids
in public schools deal with vision issues,”
Zucker says. “They are put in special class-
es, or [misdiagnosed as having] a learning
disability, when all they need is glasses.”
That program started with five schools in
Watts, then the entire Inglewood school
system (12,000 students), then Long Beach
(71,000). About two years ago the mobile
eyewear shops began serving the 670,000
students of L.A. Unified School District.
Beverley leaped on another opportunity
that will be unveiled this season. In part-
nership with an L.A.-based tech company
44SPORT S ILL US TR ATED- OC T OBER 21–28, 2019
NBA
PREVIEW
Kawhi Leonard’s
points-per-36-
minutes last
postseason; he also
averaged 8.4 boards
and 3.6 assists and
shot 49.0%.Michael Jordan’s
career points-per-
36-minutes in the
postseason; he also
averaged 5.5 boards
and 4.9 assists and
shot 48.7%.28.1
28.8
L.A. CLIPPERS