It was not until 14 years later that they finished over

The Clippers’ acquisition of Paul, a four-time All-Star point guard, has created a sense of disbelief, considering their decades of pratfall-laden ineptitude. Until the events of the last few days, moncler jackets the Clippers were often a joke, sometimes derided as the worst professional sports franchise in North America.

What Gerald Ford was for Chevy Chase on “Saturday Night Live,” the Clippers were for late-night comics, from Jay Leno’s early days to Conan O’Brien’s debut as host of “The Tonight Show,” when he zinged them 30 seconds into his first monologue.

“This studio holds 380 people,” O’Brien said. “It’s exactly like going to a Clippers game.”

If two players, Blake Griffin and Paul, now account for the team’s new cachet, one man, Donald Sterling, is on the hook for the last 30 seasons of futility.

A self-made billionaire, Sterling is tied at No. 293 on Forbes’s list of the 400 richest Americans. Around the N.B.A., his foibles have been fabled since his first season as the team’s owner, in 1981, when the Clippers were still playing in San Diego.

That season, they went 17-65 for a .207 winning percentage. Three years later, Sterling moved them to his hometown, Los Angeles, where they were just as bad. In 1986-87, they went 12-70. It wasn’t until the 1991-92 season, with Larry Brown as coach, that they finished over .500 and went to the playoffs.

It was not until 14 years later that they finished over .500 again and, this time, captured the only playoff series they have won with Sterling in charge.

Still, if the Clippers have been much more about comic relief than contention during his long run, they did start to return handsome profits after Sterling got a brainstorm as Staples Center was about to open for the 1999-2000 season, inviting himself into the arena built for the Lakers and the N.H.L.’s Los Angeles Kings as tenant No. 3.

Aside from that, the hits mostly kept on happening.

In 2009, Elgin Baylor, the Clippers’ general manager for 22 years, was quietly let go. He then sued Sterling, alleging age and race discrimination and claiming that Sterling made racist statements. Baylor lost in court.

In 2010, Mike Dunleavy, then the team’s general manager, was fired by Sterling and claimed the team had stopped payments on the $6.75 million remaining on his guaranteed contract.

Sterling claimed Dunleavy had not been fired.70% off moncler jackets An arbitrator awarded Dunleavy the $6.75 million, and $5.3 million that had been deferred.

Sterling made his money in law and real estate and works out of an Art Deco landmark office building in Beverly Hills.

As a basketball owner, Sterling fell back on his legal training, peppering the people under him with questions. Whatever the answers were, they did not seem to work. Coaches came and went. The losses mounted. Sterling was seen as miserly.

Still, things did start to change when Dunleavy first came aboard as coach in 2003. He had a robust talent base, the result of many lottery picks, and in 2006, the Clippers ousted Denver in the first round of the playoffs.

And that was it. The next three seasons were disasters, ruined by injuries and finger-pointing, including Sterling’s 2008 gibe at Dunleavy. “Does anybody love their coach?” Sterling said to

T. J. Simers of The Los Angeles Times. “They’re just a necessity.”

In a surprise, Dunleavy lasted two more seasons after that. All but unnoticed, Dunleavy and Neil Olshey, his successor as general manager, rebuilt the team once more, with talented players like Eric Gordon, now gone in the trade for Paul, and DeAndre Jordan. The jackpot was the lottery draw that gave them the No. 1 pick and Griffin in 2009.

In keeping with Clipper tradition, a knee injury cost Griffin his rookie season and Dunleavy his job. But then came 2010-11, when Griffin catapulted himself above the Knicks’ Timofey Mozgov in an early season highlight dunk; over an automobile on All-Star Weekend; and into the stratosphere with some of the game’s greats while averaging 22.5 points, 12.1 rebounds and 3.8 assists.

“He may be even more eye-popping than Julius Erving,” said Dunleavy, who played with Erving in Philadelphia.

“The thing about Julius that was really special, he had the biggest hands basically of anybody you had ever seen,” Dunleavy said. “It wasn’t that he jumped through the roof. It was just that he had such control, when he went to dunk and somebody tried to block it, he could move the ball on them and finish. Blake will just break your arm.”

And now, with Paul on board, things have changed for the Clippers.

So much, then, for the days like the one in 1994 when Ron Harper, bristling at having his $4 million option picked up, moncler winter boots 2011 noted he was “just doing my jail time,” and was suspended by the team but celebrated by his teammates, who took the floor for the next game with his number written on their sneakers.