As Baron Davis mentioned on his blog today, last night's debut for him as a member of the Clippers was definitely not the start he was expecting. Baron played well in the first quarter and his team followed suit, but once the bench came in things got completely out of hand, to the point where the team was embarrassingly run off their home floor by a margin of 38 points.
Davis admitted today that the Clippers "got smacked in the mouth," and that he was actually "admiring" the way the Lakers looked "top to bottom." Last night however, he wasn't feeling so warm and fuzzy. The team kept the locker room closed after the loss, and Davis called a team meeting to (presumably) rip everybody a new one for completely giving up like that and truly not even trying for most of the second half.
The final stat line that Davis himself put up wasn't all that spectacular, but this meeting I'm sure wasn't about stats, or even wins and losses. It was likely about playing the game the right way. Even if the team felt they had no shot to come back and win against the Lakers, that doesn't mean they had to go out the way they did. The Clippers ran virtually no plays that resembled any type of offensive scheme in the second half, and their defensive intensity was nonexistent, allowing several Laker highlights after the game's outcome had already been long decided.
Baron absolutely did the right thing by taking the leadership role from game one, and letting the team know that this is absolutely not how he intends to spend his first season in L.A., playing alongside a bunch of players that simply quit when their chances of winning seem distant at best. However, it's hard to believe that while Baron was sitting on the bench in the fourth quarter looking at the Clippers logo on his uniform, and watching his teammates get blown out by 40 at home, that he wasn't second guessing his decision to sign with this organization in the first place.
