by Randy Hill

That hasn't prevented the barkers of basketball reporting from seeking a village idiot to salute. For about 22 years, a popular choice might have been Elgin Baylor, who on Tuesday was officially declared the former vice president in charge of basketball operations.

And in most of these basketball operations, the patient has been terminal.

That's because the 74-year-old Baylor — whose status as one of the greatest players in league history can't be diminished by knuckleheads who focus on his long Clipper associations — has been obliged to preside over a franchise owned by Donald T. Sterling.

To their credit, most big media thinkers demanding a reason why the Clippers have bagged the NBA's third-worst record over the last 22 years have settled on Sterling. Amen, without a commitment to coughing up big loot for uniform-wearing employees, attempting to win at professional basketball seems impossible.

Until recently, Sterling had been remarkably frugal in these matters, his payroll threatening to challenge the league's league-minimum cap. That can be a damning pretext when the franchise you share the town (and later) the hallway with is the L.A. Lakers. The talking point frequently issued by lead Sterling lieutenant Andy Roeser had been "maximum contracts for maximum players."

From his vantage point in row 1 near the L.A. Memorial Sports Arena and Staples Center mid-court stripes, Sterling wasn't seeing max power dressed in Clipper white. For too long, this interpretation was correct. Even though Elgin had seized a reasonable share of emerging talent (Hersey Hawkins, Danny Manning and Charles Smith in the late '80s, for example), the Clips who escaped in free agency didn't exactly drag their new teams to glory.

The low-ball effort to retain Maurice Taylor (departure class of Y2K) turned out to be a Sterling masterstroke, but we'll never know if retention of others through competitive spending would have spurred player and team development.

It should be noted that Baylor's draft-night record also includes the likes of Michael Olowokandi, Danny Ferry, Bo Kimble, Randy Woods and Terry Dehere. The breath-holding Ferry and Reggie Williams (the wrong Reggie was drafted in 1987) were dealt to Cleveland for Ron Harper, who — like Derek Smith, Manning and Marques Johnson — suffered a serious injury as a Clippers employee.

As a footnote to the tragic on-court history, frequent tire rotation was needed on the gurneys in the Clipper village medical facility.

The list of tremendous players passed over in the draft could be considered a stunner if you're silly enough to believe the same swings and misses can't be attached to other teams. For example, like Baylor, then-Memphis personnel boss Jerry West whiffed on Amare Stoudemire (West went with Drew Gooden). The Denver Nuggets selected Nickoloz Tskitishvili and Nene at five and seven, respectively, while Amare waited for Phoenix to take him at nine.

The 7-foot Olowokandi reportedly fostered enough intrigue to be selected No. 1 overall in '98 by a few teams that would have — like the Clips —missed on Dirk Nowitizki and Paul Pierce.

Since-departed Clips employees remain awestruck over the pre-draft workout of Kobe Bryant back in 1996, but — like 11 other franchises — the team wasn't ready to pull the trigger on a high-school kid. We'll have more on that later.

As a former Clippers beat writer (a gig I often described as not unlike having the electric-chair beat), I was aware that many of what turned out to be personnel missteps were abetted by the franchise's head coaches.

That's where the Sterling influence really teamed up with his cheap player-hiring practices to sabotage any sharp decisions Elgin might have mustered. Based on the owner's commitment to minimal spending or simply bad decisions in hiring coaches, Baylor seemed unable to work with someone whose abilities he didn't believe in or (in many cases) respect.

Although I've for many years howled about how having superstar players has been a prerequisite for NBA success, hiring an astute coach is another fine move. Unfortunately for the Clippers, the parade of (mostly) weak hires usually inspired lousy rapport with the VP of basketball ops.

That's where Elgin often was at his worst. While playing alongside West with the Lakers, Baylor helped bridge the NBA gap between mechanical, structured basketball movement and the aerial ballet we often see today. This level of on-court achievement made it difficult for Elgin to accept what he perceived as tactical or talent-judging weaknesses in the coaches he needed to deal with. The lines of communication often were either severed or irreparably jammed.

A former Clippers insider once told me that during his brief stop as head coach of the New Orleans, Baylor encountered considerable interference from those above him on the franchise food chain. As a general manager, this interference influenced his method of avoiding player acquisitions that deviated from the coach's interests.

Several insiders associated with the franchise in '96 have said that then-coach Bill Fitch was adamant about not drafting a high-school kid when Bryant was on the board.

But as the years rolled on and the Clippers continued to roll over, Elgin didn't exactly defer to those along that coaching parade route. With a nice assist of input from his personnel staff, Baylor was even credited with a draft-night score in 2000, dealing for Corey Maggette and the rights to Keyon Dooling while selecting Darius Miles and Quentin Richardson.

It's too bad high-flying dunks weren't being rewarded with playoff invitations. That group was L.A.-caliber entertaining, but still found itself escorted to the fishing hole while other teams embarked on the playoff hunt.

A year later, Baylor and the Clips selected skinny high-school big man Tyson Chandler with the second overall pick then shipped him to Chicago for Elton Brand. Brand, who had reached a far superior stage of development than Chandler at that time, provided league-wide credibility.

However, Elton didn't provide much leadership after Baylor traded Miles to Cleveland in what appeared to be a wise move that landed point guard Andre Miller. Miller mailed in his only season (2002-2003) as a Clipper (two assistant coaches told me they truly believed Miller didn't even know their names) and Brand did little to rally his other now-contract-obsessed teammates. Miller, whose assist and field-goal numbers dipped sharply from his closing Cavalier season, banked his free-agent candidacy on other teams chalking up the down year to affiliation with the Clips.

The allegedly promising Clippers ended that season with 27 victories.

In short order, Sterling's historical coaching roster added current kingpin Mike Dunleavy whose unusually high (in relative terms) eventual salary seemed to allow more personnel input than Baylor preferred at this stage of doomed Clipper employment.

Now that Elgin had corralled a few high-level players and Sterling was writing checks to keep some of them, Dunleavy was able to manage victory in the 2006 playoffs. After smacking the Denver Nuggets in Round 1, L.A. fell to the Phoenix Suns in seven.

Baylor was named the league's Executive of the Year; ironically, Dunleavy's opinion held sway when the team selected the great Yaroslav Korolev in the previous draft.

This drafting business isn't as easy as it might seem from the safety of your laptop.

And it's no hayride going to basketball war under Sterling, who's spent most of his glory years assuming nuclear arms can be matched by slingshots.