The 2019-20 Clippers season is destined to go down as a failure. Despite Paul George infamously saying that this wasn’t a “championship or bust” season, the Clippers certainly expected to advance to at least the conference finals, which would have cleared a long-standing hurdle in franchise history. The Clippers definitely anticipated getting that far once they went up 3-1 on the Denver Nuggets, a team that was already an underdog heading into the semifinal series.
We all know what happened then. The Nuggets won the last three games in increasingly improbable fashion, and the NBA community took great pleasure in celebrating the presumptive contender’s early demise.