Blake Griffin was a cultural phenomenon with the LA Clippers, but not for the reason you think

A player’s impact on sports culture can be best measured by the moments that come to mind when you mention their name.

Basketball’s greats have them: Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, on and on.

For LA Clippers forward Blake Griffin, who announced his retirement Tuesday after 14 years, there are many moments that come to mind when mentioning his name: “Lob City.” Dunking over a Kia. The Blake face. Straight baptizing Boston Celtics center Kendrick Perkins. Former LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling.

The Sterling saga, which jumped off in April 2014 when Sterling was caught on tape saying he was bothered that his mistress brought Black men to “his games,” is a blip on the radar of Griffin’s career. He’s was the No. 1 overall pick by the Clippers in 2009. A Rookie of the Year award winner in 2011. In the seven full seasons Griffin played with the Clippers, they went to the playoffs all but one year.

But Griffin and his teammates’ protest against Sterling before Game 4 of a first-round playoff series against the Golden State Warriors after the public release of his comments is probably the most lasting legacy of a splendid career that was marked by the outsized highs and the typical lows of superstar talents who never accomplish postseason success.

Griffin’s partnership with guard Chris Paul made the Clippers relevant and, more importantly, cool again. In between the time when the Clippers moved to Los Angeles in 1984 until Griffin was selected in 2009, the team had made the playoffs just four times, never winning 50 games or more. From the 2010-11 season to 2016-17, Griffin’s final full season in Los Angeles, they won at least 50 games five times.

The success of the Lob City era legitimized the Clippers franchise to the point that two things happened. After NBA commissioner Adam Silver banned Sterling from the league for life, the team was sold to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in May 2014 for $2 billion, the largest team sale in NBA history at the time. Griffin has also turned the wayward Clippers into a destination that All-Stars such as Kawhi Leonard, Paul George and James Harden would choose to play for. “We were the old Clippers,” Griffin wrote in The Players Tribune in 2014. “We were a joke in the eyes of the media back then. They just wanted to laugh at us.”

You can argue his Hall of Fame bona fides all you want, but Griffin is an important piece of the history of the NBA. He was a part of a culture-shifting moment in Los Angeles, one that influenced copycats. “Dunk City” doesn’t hit the same, does it?

As the game evolved — and age and many lower body injuries started to add up — so, too, did Griffin. When he entered the league in 2009, it was still a league of giants. He relied on his athleticism to play above the rim about as well as anyone in the league. Getting in a jump-off with Griffin was the equivalent of throwing a fastball to Barry Bonds or meeting Derrick Henry straight-up at the line of scrimmage. It was a pointless endeavor.

But by the time Griffin was shockingly traded to the Detroit Pistons in 2018, there wasn’t much bounce left in those knees. So like the rest of the league, Griffin shifted his game to behind the 3-point line. From the 2010-11 season to 2016-17, Griffin shot 29.9% on 0.6 3-point attempts per game. From 2017-18 to 2022-23, he shot 33.4% on 4.7 attempts per game. He didn’t become Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, but he turned himself into a stretch-4 who could reliably hit from deep. Many big men didn’t last in the league when the push came for more 3-point shooting. Griffin thrived.

But he did most of that all while under the direction of Sterling, whose teams usually had the lowest attendance in the league. Sterling had been known to be prejudiced against Black people, illustrated by a federal housing discrimination lawsuit for, among other things, saying his Black tenants “smell and attract vermin.” Former team general manager and Hall of Fame player Elgin Baylor alleged in a lawsuit that Sterling told him that he wanted a roster made up of “poor black boys from the South” and a white head coach. Sterling settled the housing discrimination lawsuit, and a jury ruled in his favor in Baylor’s suit.

After the Clippers drafted Griffin, Sterling paraded him around a swanky party at his mansion like Griffin was his finest steer, constantly nudging his newest Black employee to talk about his sexual prowess.

Griffin said he felt powerless in that moment, as he was only 20, interacting with his superior. Power imbalance is a precursor to silence, as Sterling was allowed to operate this way for decades. “The guy was my boss,” Griffin wrote in The Players Tribune six months after the Sterling tape was revealed. “Ask yourself, how would you react if your boss was doing the same thing to you?”

After the Sterling tapes were released in 2014, in the middle of the team’s series with the Warriors, Griffin and his teammates had what felt like the weight of the world on their backs. The owner of the team they played for had been caught saying racist stuff, but all the pressure seemed to be on them. They had to boycott. They had to call for Sterling’s ownership. They had to take all the risk while the public got to enjoy the reward of Sterling’s departure.

Instead of refusing to play Game 4 of the series, the players removed their warmup tops, turned them inside out to cover up the team logo, and walked to midcourt to throw them all in a pile. It wasn’t exactly standing at the front lines of a protest — Griffin told GQ that he was one of the players who advocated against boycotting the Warriors game — but it was one of the few times in recent memory that a team stood up to the team owner. Sterling wasn’t going to survive what he said on those tapes, but there’s still inherent risk in rocking the boat like that so publicly.

Five years before the release of the Sterling tapes, Griffin was too afraid to ask his boss to stop touching and grabbing him at an all-white party, but here he was with his teammates, essentially telling Sterling to kick rocks.

“We were trying to decide what to do, and everybody was saying we should boycott, we shouldn’t play,” Griffin told ESPN in 2019. “The idea was like, OK, we haven’t been playing for him in the first place. We didn’t gather up before the jump ball and say, ‘Donald Sterling on three! One, two, three!’ ”

The Clippers’ demonstration followed in the path of the Miami Heat wearing hoodies following the 2012 slaying of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, further illustrating that when NBA players talk, people have to listen. The Clippers’ reaction of course got Sterling removed, but it also showed that players have some of power in the NBA: Eight years later, after an ESPN investigation found that then-Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver had made racist and sexist comments, players like Los Angeles Laker LeBron James (“There is no place for misogyny, sexism, and racism in any workplace”) and Suns guard Paul (“I was and am horrified and disappointed by what I read”) made their dissatisfaction known. Sarver sold the team in 2022.

“It was a stand for respect,” Griffin told ESPN in the 2019 article. “At the end of the day, that’s what this is all about. It’s respect for humankind. That was just a somewhat small incident that was able to ignite a whole bigger thing and to bring understanding about this.

“I always go back to the thought that it takes a very educated and thoughtful person to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”