Los Angeles Clippers

Los Angeles Clippers hold a distinction no other franchise in North American professional sport can claim: across more than five decades they have never once played for a championship. The club that would carry that record started life in 1970 as the Buffalo Braves, moved to San Diego in 1978, and only became the Los Angeles Clippers after a second relocation in 1984.

The closest the franchise has come since was 2021, when it reached the Western Conference Finals and lost to the Phoenix Suns.

Ownership changed hands in 2014, when Steve Ballmer bought the club for two billion dollars. Ten years later the Clippers left the arena they had shared with the Los Angeles Lakers — a crosstown rivalry known as the Hallway Series — and opened the 2024–25 season at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, an 18,000-seat building of their own.

The roster has carried Hall of Fame names since the Buffalo days, among them Bob McAdoo and Bill Walton, and more recently Kawhi Leonard, Paul George and James Harden. None of them has delivered what the franchise has chased since 1970. Three Pacific Division titles, in 2013, 2014 and 2024, sit in the record book. A championship, or even a trip to the Finals, does not.