Brook Lopez is joining a Clippers team that is nothing like the one he grew up watching
LAS VEGAS (AP) — Brook Lopez grew up in Southern California. He remembers the days when the Los Angeles Clippers were awful.
Those years are long gone — and Lopez is betting that even better years are ahead.
Advertisement
Lopez discussed his decision to join the Clippers on a two-year contract worth nearly $18 million on Monday at NBA Summer League in Las Vegas, raving about how far the once-woebegone franchise has come. The Clippers have posted 14 consecutive winning seasons, the longest active streak in the NBA.
'It's crazy to see, but it's very cool," Lopez told reporters. "Seeing the climb, the ascent, I'm a Cali boy. I grew up in the valley in North Hollywood. Obviously, things were very different back then. And to see where the Clippers have come now, it's just astonishing. It's beautiful. I'm glad to be a part of it. And hopefully, I can help take them even further up.'
Lopez was born in 1988 and over the first 25 years of his life the Clippers had the NBA's worst overall record. In the 12 years since, they have the league's second-best record behind only Golden State. They play in a palace of a new arena, Intuit Dome, have stars like James Harden and Kawhi Leonard, have a title-winning coach in Tyronn Lue and have one of the league's biggest-spending and most-committed owners in Steve Ballmer.
If all that wasn't enough, the Clippers' front office is run now by Lawrence Frank, who was Lopez's first NBA coach with the then-New Jersey Nets.
Advertisement
'Definitely a full-circle moment,' Lopez said.
Lopez comes back to the Los Angeles area — he played for the Lakers in 2017-18 — after spending seven seasons with Milwaukee and helping the Bucks win a title. He averaged 13 points and 2.1 blocks per game in those seven seasons with the Bucks, and the 37-year-old has averaged 15.9 points in 17 NBA seasons.
He's been a starter for basically his entire career, though may see a different role with the Clippers — already a staunch defensive team featuring defensive player of the year candidate and fellow 7-footer Ivica Zubac as the starting center.
'I think we complement each other extremely well," Lopez said. "Obviously, we'll be very big. I think we'll be great defensively, just dominating the paint, sealing the paint off. And then offensively, we complement each other there as well. Spread the floor for him, give him all the room in the paint for him to go wild.'
Advertisement
There are some perks: He's going home, and the well-known Disney enthusiast will be playing his home games about a half-hour drive from Disneyland. But the biggest perk, Lopez thinks, is joining a team that he believes is good enough to contend for a title.
'The money's nice, but that's not what it's about for me," Lopez said. "I love playing, I love hooping, I've loved it since I was a little kid. I watched my older brothers play. I've just always been around it and I love winning just as much. I just want to keep winning. I got a great taste for it in Milwaukee and these guys are all about that here and I'm all about it. So, it's a perfect fit.'
___
AP NBA: https://apnews.com/hub/NBA
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
29 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Defending champions Sinner and Sabalenka lead entry lists for the US Open
NEW YORK (AP) — Defending champions Jannik Sinner and Aryna Sabalenka, who both top the tennis rankings, led 10 former winners of the U.S. Open who were on the entry lists for this year's tournament that were announced Tuesday. The fields include 18 past Grand Slam singles champions, the U.S. Tennis Association said. Advertisement Direct entry into the final major tournament of the tennis season was based on the rankings through July 14. The cutoff was at No. 101 for the men and No. 99 for the women. Sinner earned his fourth Grand Slam title when he beat No. 2 Carlos Alcaraz in the Wimbledon final. Sabalenka lost in the semifinals to Amanda Anisimova, who at No. 7 is one of four American women ranked in the top 8. The U.S. led all countries with 30 players (16 women, 14 men) earning direct entry. Players who used a special or protected ranking to qualify included Nick Kyrgios, Petra Kvitova and Sorana Cirstea. Play in the main draw begins Aug. 24. ___ AP tennis: The Associated Press
New York Times
29 minutes ago
- New York Times
Garrett Wilson, Sauce Gardner are a reminder of what has gone — and what can go — right for Jets
Think about all of the misses and mistakes, the noise and the dysfunction and the losing and the losing and the losing. The Jets spent years walking up and down the beach with a metal detector looking for gold but they rarely found it. Years of poor drafts, which led to overpaying free agents and targeting past-their-prime stars to make some noise because of a failure to develop their own into stars. For a while, it was rare that a Jets rookie would even get a second contract. Sometimes the team just wasn't willing to pay up, especially before they had to, but most of the time it was because they lacked young talent worthy of a preemptive pay rise. Advertisement They've shuffled through general managers and head coaches, and quarterbacks and coordinators, but finally in 2022 two superstars landed in their laps — players and personalities worthy of bucking trends, changing motives, building around, making the faces of an organization starved for star power. These are players they drafted, the products of scouting and intuition and a little bit of luck. The Jets shuffled through Santana Moss, Devin Smith, Ardarius Stewart and Denzel Mims before they landed on Garrett Wilson. Before Sauce Gardner, there was Dee Milliner and Kyle Wilson. In 2022, the Jets got it right. Finally. Three years later, 14 years since the last time the Jets made the playoffs, Wilson and Gardner are their identity. That's what the Jets are paying for. This week, both signed significant contracts, extensions worth more than $250 million combined, through the 2030 season. As a collective, the home-run success of drafting Gardner and Wilson hasn't worked out yet. They've won only 19 games in three seasons, but that's not really the young stars' fault. It's everything around them: bad coaching and bad quarterbacking and bad luck. In a way, Gardner and Wilson might be the ones to blame for a certain aspect of recent failure — but not in the true sense of the word 'blame.' They were too good, too fast — Gardner an All-Pro and the Defensive Rookie of the Year in 2022, Wilson that season's Offensive Rookie of the Year. That Jets team was young and without expectation, yet they started 6-3 and the organization developed delusions of grandeur, a feeling that something special was brewing and that they should speed up the timeline to win now. They were a quarterback away, right? So that led them down the path of Aaron Rodgers. It was a disaster, among many. But, even in 2022, the signs were there that the Jets were headed in the right direction and it started with that rookie class — adding in defensive end Jermaine Johnson (also a first-round pick) and running back Breece Hall. Gardner and WIlson immediately exceeding the massive expectations that come with being a top-10 draft pick was the first sign that things were changing for the better. As everything crumbled around them, they remained the saving grace. Gardner has been an All-Pro in two of three NFL seasons. Maybe he didn't live up to those massive expectations in 2024 (zero interceptions), but he remains one of the NFL's best cornerbacks. It's undeniable that if he had ever hit the open market, he would've been paid this way too — and it can't hurt that a new Jets defense led by Aaron Glenn and defensive coordinator Steve Wilks (one expected to go heavy on blitzing and man coverage) is well-suited to capitalize on his talents and highlight his status as one of the NFL's few true shutdown cornerbacks. Wilson is one of only five wide receivers to ever tally at least 80 receptions, 1,000 yards and three touchdowns in each of his first three seasons — and all the while catching passes from Zach Wilson, Mike White, Joe Flacco, Chris Streveler, Tim Boyle, Trevor Siemian and Rodgers, an NFL legend who ultimately hindered Wilson's production more than he helped it. There were three play-callers in three years, and the one who held that role at the start of the last two seasons (Nathaniel Hackett) was particularly disastrous. Advertisement Wilson was a rarity over the last three years, a young player unafraid to speak his mind, a go-to quote for the media from the minute he stepped into an NFL locker room. He is what former Jets coach Jeff Ulbrich would refer to as a 'truth teller' — and most coaches and players who came through this organization in recent years would tell you it's a place that needed more of those, someone willing to call out a problem instead of letting it fester. Wilson came from an Ohio State program that rarely lost, and joined one that rarely wins. As the losses piled up — sometimes in horrifying fashion over the last two years, the result of mind-numbing mistakes in key moments — Wilson often diagnosed decades of dysfunction with a simple turn of phrase, like after a particularly embarrassing loss to the Dolphins in December last year, one of many that featured a late-game blown lead. 'When you're up in the fourth quarter all of a sudden it starts to feel like we have a losing problem, like a gene or some s—,' he said. Then he took it further. 'How shocking is it? If you had told me that in training camp I would've been shocked. As far as how the season's went and stuff like that, I ain't that shocked,' Wilson said. 'If you had told me that in training camp, after the way we prepped, the way we practiced, the way we handled business when we had the other teams come in, I would've been like: Yeah, you're lying. Hell no. We put it together, but one of my takeaways from this is we gotta win when the season comes. Winning in the offseason is winning in the offseason. Winning in training camp is winning in training camp. Let's win when it matters.' Wilson explained the last decade of Jets football, off the cuff, in a postgame soundbite. This is a team that used to chase headlines. They had plenty of experience 'winning' the offseason, but it rarely amounted to wins when it mattered. Advertisement Then Glenn arrived, along with general manager Darren Mougey. It's a duo that arrived in New Jersey with a clearly-laid-out plan, a true vision for how to bring the Jets back. It wasn't going to happen in one offseason so they've stayed quiet, a free-agency period marked by bargain shopping while other teams in their division chased the big fish. Mougey and Glenn didn't sell owner Woody Johnson on a get-rich-quick scheme — the kind that might have won him over in the past — but instead on a plan to establish the culture Glenn learned about when he played for the Jets himself, for Bill Parcells. The focus became bringing in the right kind of people, and keeping the right ones that were already here. That's Wilson, that's Gardner, and earlier in the offseason that was linebacker Jamien Sherwood — a late-round success story of the previous regime. Before Quinnen Williams in 2023, Muhammad Wilkerson was the last Jets first-round pick to sign a second contract with the team — in 2016. The Williams deal and now the Gardner and Wilson ones, happening earlier than these things usually do, represent a needed organizational shift. Better late than never. Though even as last season ended, it was never a guarantee that the Jets would end up here. If they had stuck it out with Rodgers, the conversation around Wilson right now might be much different. There has been a belief since late last season that if Rodgers came back, and if all the offense-related nonsense that had been pervasive through Wilson's first three years had persisted, that he wouldn't be long for Florham Park, that this summer might have revolved around a trade request instead of a contract extension. Instead, the Jets flushed out the nonsense. They dumped Rodgers, cleaned house in the coaching staff and front office and started anew, with Wilson and Gardner at the center of their plans. They signed a quarterback with potential (Justin Fields) and college ties to their star wide receiver. Glenn and Mougey both made it clear to their young stars that contract extensions were a priority — even if they weren't going to rush into a new deal. Patience was requested, and received. Mougey didn't want to start contract talks until after the NFL Draft and free agency, but he and Glenn also didn't want to let this linger into training camp. So they waited, and then it worked out — all with the stamp of approval from ownership. The Johnson family has had an affinity for both Gardner and Wilson since their rookie seasons, and they wanted this duo here for the long haul. The Wilson contract is a win. The Gardner contract is a win. The Glenn and Mougey tenures, so far, have been wins. The next step, everyone knows, is the hardest one. As Wilson put it last December: winning when the games start. Everybody will forget this moment if the losses start piling up again. But for now at least, there's reason to celebrate.
Washington Post
32 minutes ago
- Washington Post
Defending champions Sinner and Sabalenka lead entry lists for the US Open
NEW YORK — Defending champions Jannik Sinner and Aryna Sabalenka, who both top the tennis rankings, led 10 former winners of the U.S. Open who were on the entry lists for this year's tournament that were announced Tuesday. The fields include 18 past Grand Slam singles champions, the U.S. Tennis Association said.
