Clipped Ending Explained: The Final Fall of Donald Sterling

After HBO aired two seasons of Winning Time, a series about the often-controversial glories of the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1980s, FX responded with a series about Los Angeles’ other pro basketball team.

That would be the Clippers, an organization that shares a building with the Lakers while offering all the dysfunction but none of the championship banners.

Rather than concentrating on past glories, the FX series Clipped has told the story of the 2014 scandal in which longtime owner Donald Sterling was banned for life from the NBA and forced to sell.

Clipped wrapped up on Tuesday, with the final chapter of Sterling as the team’s owner.

Sterling may have been forced out of ownership, a rare occurrence in American sports, although he did sell the team, bought years earlier for just $12.5 million, for $2 billion.

And Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, emerged as the winning bidder.

Meanwhile, V. Stiviano winds up, down, and out, Shelly Sterling shows her true colors, and Doc Rivers gets the last word.

Also, it’s made clear that the Sterlings were still living together at the time of the Ferguson unrest, which began later in 2014.

A farewell to Donald

The series’ sixth and final episode, “Keep Smiling,” picks up where the previous week left off: Commissioner Adam Silver has announced that Sterling (Ed O’Neill) is banned and will force the team’s sale.

At the end of the fifth episode, Sterling’s long-suffering wife, Shelly (Jacki Weaver), agrees to participate in the sale process, even though Donald is not yet on board.

Sterling and Cooper

As the finale begins, Shelly meets with prospective buyers while Donald is still trying to burnish his image, sitting for an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

Later, we see the Clippers players and Shelly watching Sterling’s interview, which was viewed as a disaster.

The actor playing Cooper doesn’t look much like him.

The series left out the most memorable part of the interview, when Sterling — not having done much homework about his openly gay interviewer — asked him, “Did you ever like a girl? Were you ever jealous of her a little bit if she was with other guys?”

Greasing the sale

Shortly after, Shelly reveals to her lawyers that she had earlier changed the terms of the family trust so that if either is found incompetent, they are not required to both sign off on decisions.

In the next scene, a doctor tells Donald that he has Alzheimer’s Disease.

The Sterlings meet with Steve Ballmer, the billionaire former CEO of Microsoft. We later learn Shelly and Ballmer have a term sheet, but Donald resists the idea.

Soon after, Sterling tells Shelly he is suing her and the NBA. Sterling testifies in court, arguing that the NBA manipulated Shelly into forcing Donald out.

Donald frequently interrupts during the hearing, insulting his wife and leading to a loss in court.

The basketball side

On the team side of the show, we see the Clippers, who had been playing playoff basketball during all this, finally getting eliminated. Doc Rivers (Laurence Fishburne) appears worn from all those events.

He also gets an opportunity to tell off the fired team executive Andy (Kelly Aucoin) for never standing up to Donald for years and gets one more heart-to-heart scene with his unlikely friend LaVar Burton (as himself).

The two men discuss how they navigate life as well-known Black men and how they balance being acceptable to the pain they have suffered in the past.

At the end of the episode, one player states, “They own the teams, but we own the league,” hinting at the greater voice NBA players would start taking, especially following the killing of George Floyd.

What of V?

And then there’s V. Stiviano (Cleopatra Coleman), Donald’s former assistant and mistress, whose recording of racist comments led to his downfall.

We see her plotting her next move after the scandal while her lawyer warns her to slow down her spending. She gets a courtroom scene about Shelly’s lawsuit against her.

By the end, V. has lost the case and her house and is confronted by some boorish racists at a bar. We learn later that Shelly personally insisted on taking V.’s duplex, giving it to her housekeeper.

Indeed, the finale drives home the point that while she wasn’t quite as much of a monster as her husband, Shelly was far from an admirable individual herself.

How it ends

The series ends with Donald Sterling sunbathing nude, covered only by a strategically placed newspaper, and Shelly warning him about a past “melanoma scare” in a way that indicates they still live in the same house.

Then, we see Shelly listening to the controversial tapes in her car before new owner Steve Ballmer yells a motivational speech at the team, which the players later mock.

The players are seen exiting a bus and are greeted by some high school kids, one of whom asks Blake Griffin to sign a shirt.

The final scene has Doc Rivers shooting baskets with Elgin Baylor (Clifton Davis), the all-time great who suffered for years as Sterling’s general manager.

Clipped thoughts

Donald Sterling is still alive, having turned 90 earlier this year. He has remained a reclusive figure since selling the Clippers, although it doesn’t appear he and Shelly ever divorced.

Whether or not Sterling ever really had Alzheimer’s is unclear.

While the Lakers figures depicted in Winning Time had many strong opinions about their characterizations, the Clipped characters have not commented much, if at all.

This includes the still-active NBA player Chris Paul and still-active NBA coach Doc Rivers,

The $2 billion Clippers sale was the largest in league history, but NBA franchise values have only gone up since, with the Phoenix Suns selling for $4 billion in 2022.

J.J. Redick, depicted on the show as a Clippers player, was recently named coach of the Lakers.

Since Ballmer took over, the Clippers have certainly abandoned the cheapness, dysfunction, and perpetual embarrassment of the Sterling era. And while they have contended, they remain titleless.

Did you watch Clipped?

What did you think of the ending?