Clippings: Thank you

Hello, Clips Nation. It has been quite the year.

About 15 months ago, we celebrated the start of this Clippers season with the news of Patrick Beverley re-signing with the team. The hype only amped up through the rest of the week, as the Clippers added Maurice Harkless, Rodney McGruder, Kawhi Leonard, Paul George, and Ivica Zubac to their 2019-20 roster. (Those names are listed in order of when their deals were agreed upon, but potentially also in order of their importance to the team’s future. You decide.)

It was hard to imagine then that this season — which should have been the most successful in franchise history by a large margin — would end this way. But regardless of how unsatisfying the 2019-20 Clippers campaign was, the experience of covering it here for Clips Nation was anything but.

For that, I want to thank all of you who have stuck with the site and continued to make this a home for Clippers fans everywhere. I thoroughly enjoyed celebrating the highs of this season with all of you, and I derived some catharsis out of dissecting the lows in this space as well. Thank you all for giving our crew a chance to chronicle this season with you. I am so very grateful for that opportunity.

I’d also like to thank Blake Harris and Alicia Rodriguez for all their work in keeping this site afloat. They’re both incredibly talented and provide a really interesting perspective on all things Clippers. I hope you’ve enjoyed their work as much as I have.

When I returned to Clips Nation in February, my goal was for our coverage to match the excellence of the team on the court. I regret setting such a low bar. This community has been privy to some of the very best Clippers content on the Internet for a long time, and our staff has tried our very best to uphold that standard.

There is still always room for growth. We have a potentially long offseason ahead of us, and as the Clippers work to get better for next year, so too will we work to improve our coverage. I have no idea where the Clippers go from here, or when the next NBA season even begins, but Clips Nation will still be a regular presence through it all. Thanks again for sharing in this journey with us.

More news for Monday:

• Rob Mahoney tries to figure out how a league obsessed with spacing almost missed out on a historically great shooter in Duncan Robinson.
• Dan Devine goes over the questions facing the Clippers (and other second-round losers) this offseason.
• Andrew Greif looks at the long-term implications of playoff collapses.
• Jared Dubin digs into why there have been so many replay reviews this postseason.
• Kelly Cohen speaks with the nuns who have become some of the Miami Heat’s biggest (virtual) fans.
• Scott Cacciola has a lovely story on the Van Gundy brothers taking advantage of their unexpected time together in the NBA bubble.
• The WNBA had to postpone a semifinal playoff game due to inconclusive COVID-19 tests, another reminder of how fortunate the NBA has been in keeping the coronavirus out of the bubble.
• Mike Prada examines how one team that did get to play its WNBA semifinal — the Las Vegas Aces — is a great test case for offensive stylistic diversity.