Irandaily | No. 4441 | Sports

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Without Griffin, Clippers Fall to Wizards

The Los Angeles Clippers were missing Blake Griffin and Chris Paul. The Washington Wizards won the game.
Tread carefully around Randy Wittman when trying to connect those two thoughts.
‘’Hey, listen, we played enough games this year without players,’’ the Wizards coach said. ‘’Don’t give me the (bull) about who was here and who wasn’t here. ... You guys would have printed it a wholly different other way if we had lost. ... Now you’re going to print, ‘Ah, you won because Blake didn’t play.’ Give me a break.’’
To be fair, the outburst was more playful than angry, but the point is well-taken, AP wrote. The Wizards will happily take Monday night’s 98-90 win - or any victory for that matter - in a season that was essentially wrecked from the get-go in part because of injuries to John Wall and Nene.
Now it’s the Clippers who are close to falling off the rails, having lost seven of nine - including six of eight without Paul. Los Angeles is 1-3 halfway through an eight-game road trip and has fallen 4 1/2 games off the Western Conference lead.
‘’It’s frustrating because we’re giving back a lot of what we had built up earlier in the season,’’ Clippers coach Vinny Del Negro said. ‘’But you can’t control the injuries, you can’t control the schedule, you can’t control so many guys being out.’’
Paul missed his eighth consecutive game and 11th of the last 13 with a bruised right kneecap, while Griffin’s streak of 197 consecutive games played ended when he was a last-minute scratch with a strained left hamstring.
‘’We were walking out (to the court) and he was walking in,’’ Del Negro said.
Del Negro said he knew the hamstring had been bothering Griffin, who leads the Clippers in scoring and rebounding with 18.5 points and 8.6 boards per game. The coach declined to speculate when Griffin would return. The road trip continues against the Orlando Magic on Wednesday.
‘’We’ll see how he feels tomorrow,’’ Del Negro said.
Griffin had started every game since he essentially became an NBA player at the start of the 2010 season, having sat out in 2009-10 with a knee injury after he was drafted No. 1 overall by the Clippers.
Nevertheless, his teammates were in the game until a spate of turnovers and a pair of offensive rebounds by Wizards forward Nene spurred a 7-0 run by Washington late in the fourth quarter.

Murray in Tennis Doping Test Call

Andy Murray wants tennis to learn from the Lance Armstrong doping scandal and introduce tighter controls.
The British number one believes that prize funds should be reduced if it is the only way to fund more regular blood testing and protect the sport’s image, BBC wrote.
“It’s down to our governing bodies and the ATP to invest some of our own money and make sure we get more testing done,” he said.
“If it means taking some of the money out of the players’ earnings then that’s what we have to do.”
Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes is currently on trial in Madrid after admitting providing athletes with banned substances in sport’s latest drug inquiry.
The World Anti-Doping Agency was initially told that tennis players were amongst the sportspeople supplied by Fuentes when his operation was uncovered by Spanish police in 2006.
However Fuentes is only being tried over doping in one sport as cyclists were the only athletes that could be identified from the bags of blood seized.
“I think it’s essential that the names and whoever was involved with it, it’s essential for tennis that that comes out,” said Murray.
“If one in 100 is doping then, in my eyes, that isn’t a clean sport and we need to everything we can to ensure we have everyone that’s competing at the highest level and below is clean.
“I know what goes in my body and I know from my side that I’m clean, so that’s all I can comment on.”
Armstrong recently admitted cheating en route to winning all seven of his Tour de France titles, and US Open champion Murray believes that the damage done to cycling has focused minds across sport.
“I don’t want that happening for my sport because it would be terrible,” he said.
“Every single week right now there’s something different and it’s bad for sport.”
Murray argues that more blood tests, combined with biological passports that monitor for the effects of doping, is the best tactic to ensure a clean sport and may not be as costly as first appears.
“The only way you can improve your testing procedures is by having more of them and you need money to do that--it’s a cost thing,” he added.
“But in the long term I think you save money because I think more people would come to watch sports, rather than reading all the time about these doping scandals.”

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