Flak Magazine: Kick Out the Sports! 05.31.04

Two long-running characters disappeared from television this year — Seattle radio host Frasier Crane and Los Angeles Clippers vice president of basketball operations Elgin Baylor.

Baylor, like Frasier, was an underrated character whose sendoff did not get the proper hype.

For years, he was a regular on the NBA draft lottery, the televised, Powerball-like drawing to determine the upcoming order of selection by the league's sorriest teams.

With the Clippers making the playoffs only three times in the last 20 years, Baylor has sat in the lottery chair so often it should be endowed. Clippers coach Mike Dunleavy — inexplicably sent in Baylor's stead this year — should have announced that he was not merely representing the NBA's sorriest franchise, but that he also was filling the Elgin Baylor Chair in Lottery Studies.

I don't know that Baylor has showed up at all of the Clippers' previous 16 lottery appearances. But even in the rare times he has not appeared, his presence has been felt. It was Baylor who set the tone for how a team's lottery representative should act in the lottery seat — like someone getting a driver's license photo taken. Vacant stare, uncomfortable smile, stiff back. This is no time to celebrate — you're a loser!

Baylor's performances are a mastery of understatement, like Clint Eastwood in his Spaghetti Western phase. If ESPN had run a "20 years of lottery" retrospective in its coverage of the 2004 event, it would have looked like one of those "Life in Hell" cartoons where Akbar and Jeff hold the same pose for every panel, except that Baylor's hair would get slightly grayer and slightly more receded in every frame.

Baylor and the Clippers are hardly alone as repeaters in the lottery. For example, Washington, Golden State, Atlanta, Chicago and Cleveland all have joined the Clippers every year since 1999 — that's nearly half of the 14 spots — 13 until the expansion Charlotte Bobcats joined the crowd last week. And except for the Cleveland Cavaliers, who got man-child LeBron James last year and are astutely searching for good role players to put around him, all those teams probably will be back next year.

But most teams will send different representatives every year, so no other character with Baylor's presence and influence has emerged. The only individual who can come close to Baylor's screen presence is Orlando general manager Pat Williams, he of the Jim Carrey school of overacting. He has only appeared three times, including this year, but each time has cackled and raised his arms in victory as his team ended up with the No. 1 pick. (On a side note, Philadelphia 76ers executive Billy King took one of Smarty Jones' horseshoes to this year's lottery as a good-luck charm. He would have been better off taking one of Williams' shoes.)

No matter what pick the Clippers draw, Baylor's look is the same. That tight smile, though, could be abject fear. That's because Baylor, while no general managing genius, also works for Donald Sterling, the worst owner in sports. It used to be that Sterling would destroy his Clippers teams by being cheap and disinterested. Now Sterling's spending a few bucks on players like Elton Brand and Corey Maggette. But he's still disinterested.

The Clippers are the most common kind of team that returns year after year — the toxic organization. The Clippers either make lousy picks (Michael Olowokandi at No. 1?), or turn their good picks into middling players (think Danny Manning) by subjecting them to a Sterling-uninspired revolving door of coaches and malcontent players.

So generally that would mean Baylor would come back and fit himself snugly into the ass-groove he's created, but instead the team sent Dunleavy. He got the role all wrong. Dunleavy smiled comfortably, leaned over in his seat, talked jauntily with the TV studio hosts, and looked happy that the Clippers, the fifth-worst team by record in 2003-04, had beaten the odds and moved up to the No. 2 pick. Most everyone else — with the notable exception of Williams — was Baylor-like in their demeanor, sitting in the two-tiered, game show-like set like it was Purgatory's Match Game.

Even if Baylor didn't get his own retrospective during ESPN's coverage of this year's lottery, it's nice to see that others at least were willing to pay him tribute.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.