When you're Mike Dunleavy, coach of the Los Angeles Clippers, each morning before you put your feet onto the floor to climb out of bed, you look carefully down and make sure the floor hasn't been somehow removed in the middle of the night.
If you coach the Clippers, you know that no misfortune or misstep is ever out of the realm of possibility, no matter how wild the notion or how long the statistical odds. If you blow that whistle and draw up the Xs and Os for the Staples Center jayvee team long enough, you understand that around every corner is a runaway tractor-trailer coming to flatten you into the asphalt.
Never mind the old comic strip image of Lucy yanking away the football every time that Charlie Brown tries to kick it. In the Clippers' version of perpetual frustration, good ol' Dunleavy doesn't merely whiff on the kick. He gets dumped off the end of the Santa Monica Pier and washed halfway to Tijuana for good measure.
So when the word comes that No. 1 draft pick Blake Griffin will have his belated NBA debut pushed back from sometime in late January until sometime early next season due to surgery that is now required on his fractured left kneecap, all Dunleavy can do is shrug. All the rest of us can do is try to remember not to ever be caught standing next to a Clipper in a lightning storm.
"It's a little disappointing," Dunleavy concedes. "We've just got to move on and move forward."
That is what Dunleavy has relentlessly and doggedly done in his seven seasons of running the Clippers, through the thin and the thin.
After a breakout 47-35 season in 2005-06 when a team anchored by Elton Brand, Sam Cassell and Corey Maggette came within a pair of victories of reaching the Western Conference finals -- and for a brief time outshined the cachet of the Lakers -- things typically fell apart.
Just when the Clippers thought they had scored a coup by landing free agent Baron Davis to pair with Brand as a formidable 1-2 punch, Brand chose to fly the coop to Philadelphia. When last season's 19-63 disaster turned into the right ping-pong ball combination to deliver the College Player of the Year Griffin to L.A., he cracked his kneecap in the final preseason game.
You want comic misery? Dunleavy's team not only lost a game, but had to temporarily evacuate the arena the other night in Memphis when a broken water pipe flooded the place.
By now, maybe a lot of other guys would have simply sunk to the bottom. In fact, when Byron Scott of the New Orleans' Hornets became the first head coach fired in the NBA this season back on Nov. 13, several Las Vegas sports books posted Dunleavy as the most likely candidate to next get the ax. At that time, the Clippers had stumbled out of the starting gate at 0-4 on their way to 4-9 (Nov. 18) and 12-17 (Dec. 25).
Yet here is Dunleavy in a new year and a new decade with a club that knocked off the defending champion Lakers last week. He shares his feistiness and belief that the playoffs are still possible. At 17-20, the Clippers have won four of their last six and are only 3 1/2 games out of the final playoff position.
Could it have been only two months ago when team owner Donald Sterling might have been circling over Dunleavy and getting ready to pull the plug? Now that the mercurial Davis has rediscovered his spark and enthusiasm, center Chris Kaman is playing like the best center in the Western Conference, sophomore guard Eric Gordon is healthy and blossoming and power forward Marcus Camby is doing his usual heavy lifting on the boards and on defense along the frontline.
The loss of Griffin for the rest of the season maybe means the trade rumors around Camby can die down and the Clippers can get back to the business of simply playing. If you mix in what Griffin will be able to do -- according to virtually every expert -- with the talent that is already on hand and perhaps reach out for a free agent next summer, by the time next season arrives the Clippers could really be onto something.
Of course, if you're Dunleavy, you look down before taking that next big step. Then you keep moving forward.
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