The Beautiful, Grumpy Los Angeles Clippers

The Los Angeles Clippers are both beautiful and unpleasant to watch. The actual style of basketball they employ is fun—a melange of Chris Paul's peerless distribution and Blake Griffin's burgeoning point forward skills, topped with lots and lots of dunks—but they're exhausting and groan-worthy in the way that generic, prestige-chasing Showtime dramas are. Who has the energy, on premium cable or in the NBA, to put up with so much indignant masculine rage?

The Clips play each game as if it can be won through sheer force of argument. They do not suffer defeat so much as they are subjected to a series of awful unfairnesses. They are jobbed by the refs, or jobbed by physics, or jobbed by the heavens. They never simply lose. It is easy to imagine Paul storming off the playground in a petulant huff as a kid.

What's perversely fascinating about the Clippers is that they quarrel not just with refs and opponents, but among themselves. Some of this is teammates pushing each other to be the best they can be, but at other times the squad seems genuinely dysfunctional, with frowns and sheesh-faces all around as they head into the locker-room. Most of the fight-picking is done by Paul, a control freak par excellence who isn't satisfied when his teammates operate as an imperfect extension of his mind. If DeAndre Jordan doesn't perform a cut when Paul expects him to and the subsequent bounce-pass lands in a photographer's lap, Paul doesn't chalk the mishap up to understandable human error. Instead, he disdainfully stares Jordan down, or fitfully lectures the big man as if Jordan has crashed the family station wagon into a fire hydrant. Paul's punctiliousness is one of the reasons he's an excellent point guard, but there are times when he might be well-served to be more forgiving. His constant criticism of his colleagues occasionally lapses into counterproductive acts of belittlement.

Paul's bullying older brother management style likely annoyed and even alienated teammates during his first couple of years in Los Angeles, but as the squad's best player, he had some license to demand that everyone get on his wavelength. Last season, the Clippers' on-court hierarchy was thrown out of whack. All the improvements Paul had been pushing Griffin to make were displayed when Paul was sidelined for five weeks in the middle of the year. With a remade jumper and improved handle, Griffin's game ascended to a new level in Paul's absence, and the forward finished third in MVP voting. If this didn't drastically alter the way the Clips functioned once Paul returned from his injury, it did render them slightly less CP-centric. More crucially, Griffin's star turn positioned him as Paul's peer, not his sidekick.

Predictably, Paul hasn't accepted this reality without a fight. He is still a taskmaster, exceedingly hard on his colleagues, including Griffin. As a result, the team takes on a beaten-down quality when they're not up by double-digits, and Griffin cuts an especially frustrated figure. You can't blame him for being miffed that Paul still talks down to him. He has done everything imaginable to warrant his teammate's respect and apparently has still not totally acquired it.

At any rate, that was where the Griffin-Paul relationship stood when Griffin was forced to take an extended break at the beginning of February due to a staph infection in his elbow. While he was out, Paul commanded the team in his point god-ish way, proving once again that he remains the league's foremost offensive maestro, and that if he needs to score 30-plus to get the win, he can do that, too.

Griffin returned Sunday afternoon in a close loss against the Rockets, and the Clippers have 15 regular season games to sort themselves out. Their dilemma is not some facile debate show bullshit about Whose Team It Is, but a more human one: is Chris Paul going to start cutting Blake Griffin some hard-earned and much-deserved slack?

Winning isn't dependent on intra-squad harmony, of course. Kobe and Shaq won three titles while at philosophical odds. Jordan treated teammates like work acquaintances, not friends. Griffin and Paul might make a championship run clashing and bickering the whole time, but that wouldn't render their discord any less unnecessary. Griffin isn't playing up to the standards he set for himself last season—despite his claims to the contrary, he might be ailing a bit from a lingering back injury—but he is nobody's understudy. For the Clips to survive the Western Conference grinder, they're going to need the full extent of Blake Griffin's talents. It would help their cause if Paul would ease up on Griffin, trusting his fellow star to do what needs doing. If that's not a tactic that guarantees success, it will at least create a less emotionally taxing work environment for Griffin, who has earned as much. It might also make watching Clippers games a more enjoyable experience. A team so aesthetically joyful shouldn't be scowling this much.