I have a soft spot for Norm Powell. I’m not sure why, but ever since the boldly plain-named guard of the Toronto Raptors entered my awareness, I’ve always wanted the best for him. Every time he came off the bench and played well during the team’s 2019 championship run, I would turn to my friends with brows arched, my eyes locked into theirs, and my hands put out in front of me as if to say See, I told you about this guy. He can play. I rooted for him as he went on to bigger roles on subsequent teams—first with different versions of the Raptors, then the Portland Trail Blazers and Los Angeles Clippers.

It was with those Clippers, last year, that Powell bloomed more than ever. He filled in as a No. 2 scorer for most of a 50-win team’s season, behind James Harden; Kawhi Leonard, per usual, missed more than half of the season. It was a career year, and Powell narrowly missed inclusion on the All-Star team in a talent-drenched West. But the Clippers decided to move on from Powell this past summer, anyway, anticipating a financially queasy extension negotiation with Norm before his current deal runs out in 2026, when he’ll be 33 years old.

Strangely, though, it wasn’t really the age factor that bothered the front office. Not if all the moves they made thereafter are to tell us anything about their vision: they added Brook Lopez (37) and Bradley Beal (32; but, like Leonard, closer to 40 when his injury history is considered), and Chris Paul, a 40-year-old whose grand homecoming to Southern California has already been dashed, only 21 games into the season.

This week, Paul was dismissed from the Clippers, who are farting along at 5-16, having most recently been blown out while visiting Powell’s new team, the Miami Heat (Norm dropped 30 on them, and is even better this year, averaging 25 points per games with dazzling 51//46/88 shooting splits). Paul doesn’t really play these days, not like he used to anyway. Now a 14-minute man who kills time between starter shifts, he came back to L.A. to end his career closer to his family, and with some amount of narrative cohesion in mind for his legacy.

But there will be no neat, smiling denouement for Paul in L.A., no happy epilogue to the six years he spent making the franchise more relevant than it had ever been. In fact, when it comes to the Clippers, these days, there are no happy stories at all. Ever since scandalous news of Leonard’s potentially extra-legal contract with the team dropped in early September, it’s seemed that the organization is less a plausible basketball outfit and more a series of dark, gobsmackingly obvious parables about how not to do things, in sports or otherwise.

The Clippers’ collapse comes at a time when more than a few people are starting to ask critical questions about the technocratic trajectory of society as a whole. So it’s more than appropriate they’re failing—with no young talent or even valuable upcoming draft picks to bail them out from their failure—just as they’ve started life in a new state-of-the-art stadium, with meticulously typographed new jerseys, yet swamped by competing financial scams; head coach Ty Lue is sweating, too, having been implicated in the FBI’s showy crackdown on gambling, a set of charges that include illegal poker games Lue played in.

When Paul and Blake Griffin remade this team into a culturally explosive contender 14 years ago, Lob City looked to millennials entering adulthood like a template for a new, exciting version of basketball. But as that generation’s techno-optimism has waned, so have the Clippers’ fortunes; no, there is no escaping the realities of the game here, only the closing-in walls of adulthood; the shrinking of possibility with age, the growing weight of the past, the realization that old dreams about revolution were in fact the seeds of nightmares.

Paul can’t go back to the Clippers, and the Clippers can’t go back to what Paul made them. Stuck instead with competitive chances eerily similar to the athletic fortunes of everyday men who once bought Paul and Griffin’s sneakers, they have tied themselves to time and biology more clearly than any team; while, ironically, dressing it all up with an unusual amount of futuristic exuberance. The even greater irony? They ignited their own demise by trading Powell, who’s growing older more gracefully than almost everyone they have.

Almost everyone: they’ve got James Harden. His continued mastery in this hell of a basketball circumstance is the one hilarious silver living to this dark cloud. The devil-may-care ease of the sport’s most famously bearded man is unshakeable: he’s getting his buckets, assists, and money either way. Burn it all down around him, and he’ll be the dog drinking coffee and saying “this is fine,” but he’ll actually mean it. He scored 55 two weeks ago. He’s one of the greatest scorers ever, and could be certified top-ten in that realm as soon as this Spring. If there’s nothing else good about the decaying Clippers, there’s at least James, staying fertile no matter the turf.