ANOTHER BAD BREAK FOR THE CLIPPERS.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

Just when this Clippers season couldn't get any uglier, Shaun Livingston went up and missed a breakaway layup early in Monday night's game against Charlotte and came down with his left knee twisted sickeningly. Livingston rolled under the basket, squeezing the discombobulated joint. Sam Cassell's own face contorted in pain as he raced the trainers from the bench to the scene of the accident.

I'd come to Staples Center to write about how, two-thirds of the way through a shipwreck of a season, the Clippers should look at the standings and feel blessed to be part of a six-team fight for the last western playoff slots.

I'd planned to wrap up the bad and good news in one sentence, noting that if last season had never happened, this season would be viewed as the Clippers' best in more than a decade.

I was going to kid about the man-bites-dog headlines we'd have been writing then.

Clippers Eye .500 Season. Clippers in Playoff Chase. Clippers Hottest Team in Town as Lakers Slump.

I was going to transcribe what Mike Dunleavy said in the Clippers coach's office before the game.

"Bottom line is, right now, we're still right there," Dunleavy said after talking about everything that's gone wrong. "It's up for grabs for us."

And I was going to quote Bernie Bickerstaff from the Bobcats coach's pre-tip-off chat in the hallway, the optimistic note he struck about the Clippers.

"If they get healthy, they're still within striking distance," Bickerstaff said. "They've got experience with Sam and (Cuttino) Mobley. They still can make a run."

Now, "if they get healthy" coming to Staples anytime soon. Livingston, wheeled off the court with his leg splinted from ankle to thigh and a dozen medical and team attendants around him, was diagnosed quickly with a dislocated knee -- a doctor had to pop it back into joint right there on the floor.

The 21-year-old point guard whose NBA progress has been slowed by injuries (right shoulder, right kneecap two seasons ago, and back trouble last season) is gone again, likely for the rest of the season, with a running back's knee.

As Cassell goes from comforter of the afflicted to full-time starter at the point, the Clippers have to hope he's got two full good months in him.

The 37-year-old was at his energetic best Monday, a fearless, tumbling drive shortly before halftime making you believe Elgin Baylor had traded for Allen Iverson, but let's see if he can keep it up.

Without Bobcats killer Chris Kaman in the starting lineup (he said he had "the dead flu"), and then without Livingston, the Clips (now 27-29) won this game they had to win against Charlotte (22-35) by 100-93. Eleventh in the conference four days earlier, they moved into a tie with New Orleans for the eighth spot in the playoffs. It could be worse. Or maybe it got worse right then with 3:50 gone in the game, in a play you don't want to see again.

A year ago this week, the Clippers were coming off a 19-point win over the Lakers. Now they're about to blow through February without a victory in the month against a team with a winning record.

Bickerstaff called them "a good, solid basketball team." Meaning, I think, they ought to be doing better.

While the marquee at Staples Center advertised the Clippers and Bobcats, a banner outside the next-door Convention Center billed a conference on retroviruses and opportunistic infection. Now, this was a doubleheader. The Clippers were favored by 10 in the nightcap. I took the retroviruses minus the 3 1/2 in the opener.

What's been bugging the Clippers? Did we all oversimplify things by assuming the team that moved up 10 games to 47-35 last season, that edged the Lakers for best-in-L.A. honors, that won a playoff series for the first time in 30 years and two franchise moves, would keep right on improving with essentially the same roster?

"I'm not saying I necessarily expected a straight lineup, (but) I'm disappointed with where we are," said Dunleavy, who went so far as to bring three Camp Pendleton Marines to practice last week to try to buck up his troops.

"I don't think anybody has the real answer to it. There's all kinds of potential factors, everything from conditioning to injuries to guys getting new contracts that added pressure."

Yeah, his might be the one season that can't be blamed on Donald Sterling.

Cassell, Kaman and Tim Thomas -- and Dunleavy himself -- got some of the owner's money last summer.

Still, you watch the Clippers this season and you get a nasty feeling that Sterling karma is dragging them back down. You can't run a team as badly as he did for as long as he did and expect to set everything right overnight.

So, a year later, you have all the disconnected play that Clippers teams of the past have been known for, you have Corey Maggette bickering over playing time. And now you have this rotten-luck injury to Livingston, which felt to old-timers like the nights Marques Johnson and Danny Manning went down.

I came to Staples Center for a fresh angle on the Clippers. Only to find I'd seen all this before.

heymodesti(AT_SIGN)aol.com

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