Blake Griffin was an NBA folk hero and a cautionary tale

Blake Griffin was an NBA folk hero and a cautionary tale

One minute, Blake Griffin was leaping over a sponsored car at the slam dunk contest, taping sneaker commercials at Venice Beach, catching “Lob City” alley-oops from Chris Paul and wedging his way onto MVP ballots. The next, Griffin simply disappeared, wiped from the national landscape by a career-altering 2018 trade from the Los Angeles Clippers to the Detroit Pistons that he never saw coming.

Griffin, the top pick in the 2009 draft whose career was delayed and later derailed by injuries, announced his retirement in an Instagram post Tuesday that came nearly a year after he last took the court. At 35, the six-time all-star departs the NBA with untold millions of social media views but no championships. His supernova arrival and muted departure make Griffin a perfect case study for basketball’s fickle fame machine and help explain why loyalty has fallen out of favor among modern superstars.

“I’m thankful for every single moment — not just the good ones: the wins, the awards, the dunks, and the memorable times spent with family, friends, fans, teammates, and coaches,” Griffin wrote. “I am equally thankful for the not-so-good moments: the losses, the injuries, the wayyyy too many surgeries, the lessons, the heartbreaks, and it wouldn’t be a sports retirement letter without acknowledging the ‘haters.’ All of these experiences made my 14 years in the league truly unforgettable.”

If video cameras didn’t exist, Griffin would be talked about like Paul Bunyan. He scaled 7-foot defenders with ease. He jumped so high that he often thrusted the ball downward through the rim without touching the iron. His rare ability to contort himself in midair while corralling passes with his soft hands made him a spontaneous highlight machine years before the pace-and-space era opened wide. Thankfully, video cameras do exist, making Griffin the Michael Jordan of YouTube highlights as he earned five straight all-star selections from 2011 to 2015.

Blake Griffin, shown in 2015, was a highlight machine during the early years of his NBA career. (David J. Phillip/AP)

There was plenty of substance to his game, too. Griffin hit the glass, stretched defenses with his midrange shot and unexpectedly evolved into a skilled passer. Despite the looming presence of disgraced owner Donald Sterling, Griffin started the lengthy process of turning the Clippers into consistent winners. Repeated injuries robbed him of a payoff: Griffin missed his entire rookie season with a knee injury and dealt with several subsequent maladies that prevented the Clippers from reaching the Western Conference finals. The postseason shortcomings wore on the group, and Griffin’s partnership with Paul gradually eroded.

When Paul forced his way to the Houston Rockets in 2017, Griffin was left as the Clippers’ lone centerpiece, prompting new owner Steve Ballmer to ink the power forward to a five-year, $173 million extension. The Clippers laid it on thick during the negotiation process, hosting a mock jersey retirement and printing up inexplicable “Pioneers” T-shirts featuring Griffin’s image next to luminaries such as Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Griffin had stuck with the once-wayward organization, and the pageantry seemingly reflected the Clippers’ genuine gratitude.

Seven months later, the Clippers abruptly shipped Griffin to the Pistons in a bold and brilliant deal. Sensing Griffin wasn’t quite good enough and his health wasn’t reliable enough to lead a contender without Paul, the Clippers moved his rich new contract for spare parts and salary cap flexibility, thereby laying the groundwork for their successful pursuits of Kawhi Leonard and Paul George in 2019.

Instead of using his influence to craft a desirable exit strategy like Paul had, a blindsided Griffin was the one left hanging. Indeed, the trade left him lampooned in Detroit, where the Pistons hadn’t won a playoff series since 2008. He could have made a much bigger deal publicly out of the Clippers’ reversal, but he did famously run past Ballmer without stopping when the owner offered him a conciliatory handshake before Griffin’s first game back in Los Angeles.

Though superstars can point to Griffin’s treatment by the Clippers to justify their trade requests and free agency maneuvers, he did his best not to let the trade define him. He gave it a go in Detroit, earning all-star honors and leading a playoff run in 2019. But he wasn’t the same player because of his accumulated injuries, and his star power fizzled so far from Los Angeles, where he had cultivated a side hustle as a comedian.

As Paul made deep postseason runs with the Rockets and the Phoenix Suns, and the Clippers moved on with Leonard and George, Griffin bounced from the Pistons to the Brooklyn Nets to the Boston Celtics. Despite ever-diminishing roles, he kept seeking ways to add value, improving his three-point shot and dabbling as an undersized center on defense.

There was, in the end, plenty to be bitter about: The Clippers had chewed him up and spit him out, his knees had robbed him of his prime, and the confetti and champagne had proven elusive to the end. To his credit, he never sounded all that bitter.

“The game of basketball has given me so much in this life,” Griffin wrote in his announcement Tuesday, “and I wouldn’t change a thing.”