Holding a freshly printed box score, Clippers owner Steve Ballmer stared blankly at the sheet of paper Sunday afternoon inside Staples Center, as team president Lawrence Frank stood at his side.
The numbers were not a misprint. They told the brutal reality after one of the ugliest halves in the franchise’s five-decade history.
The Clippers were trailing Dallas by an eye-popping 50 points, the largest halftime deficit since the NBA introduced shot clocks 66 years before, and the trouble wasn’t only that star forward Kawhi Leonard missed the game, two days after needing eight stitches to close a laceration in his mouth, and forward Marcus Morris, another top defender, missed his third consecutive game because of a sore knee.