Are You a Los Angeles Clippers Fan? ‘Clipped’ Could Be Triggering

variety.com:

Andrew Wallenstein President and Chief Media Analyst These are trying times for Los Angeles Clippers fans like myself. Instead of watching our team compete in the NBA championship that began last week, we have to settle for the alternative programming we’re getting by way of FX on Hulu with the new series “Clipped.” Perhaps it should come as some comfort to the Clipper faithful that the series chronicles what feels like a bygone era in the team’s history, even though the disgraceful end of franchise owner Donald Sterling’s reign occurred less than a decade ago.

But there’s an unintended aftertaste to “Clipped” for Clippers diehards: While it reminds you how the organization has turned the page in so many different ways between then and now, there’s also a painful reminder of one particular holdover: the so-called team curse that still lingers. “People say the franchise is cursed,” Clippers coach Doc Rivers, played by Laurence Fishburne, tells his team in the first episode of “Clipped.” “There’s no magic power to defeat.” The naïveté underlying Rivers’ words, of course, is that the Clippers are one of a handful of teams in professional sports who have experienced enough misfortune to lay claim to being under the spell of some kind of bona fide hex.

Little did Rivers know at the time that he was about to be engulfed in one of the most sensational tabloid scandals in sports history.

Though he emerged perhaps the only heroic figure in a tale heavily laden with racism and sexism, the curse still eventually left its mark on him as he was never able to bring the Clippers the championship the team has never won in its 54-year history (Rivers was fired in 2020 and now coaches the Milwaukee Bucks).