The Los Angeles Clippers: 10 things you might not know

4. Still chasing the pot of gold

JAE C. HONG/AP
The Los Angeles Clippers bench looks on during the second half in Game 5 of a first-round NBA basketball playoff series against the Memphis Grizzlies in Los Angeles, April 30, 2013.

The Clippers are one of 13 NBA teams that has never won a league championship. The only other team to spend its entire existence in the NBA and go longer without securing the Larry O'Brien Championship Trophy is the Phoenix Suns, who joined the league as an expansion team in 1968. Three former American Basketball Association teams that merged with the NBA in 1976 are also still without an NBA title. They are the Indiana Pacers, Brooklyn Nets, and Denver Nuggets.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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