Odom might be a bit young to be a leader, but on the court he's been great.

Alvin Gentry is a good man, so he finds a few minutes to do an interview when, rightfully, he should be meeting with his lawyers to plan a defense strategy. This is how it goes with Clippers coaches. Endure the time with Donald T. Sterling and then, upon being fired, sweat the time away from him, because the next knock on the door could be the subpoena. DTS, you see, serves more than Pete Sampras.

With about a week remaining, Gentry has pronounced the season a success, and he is the only coach of a sub-40 win team who can say that. He has the Clips at 28 victories heading into Friday against Minnesota -- four shy than their combined total for the last two 82-game campaigns -- thus you see the compliments from colleagues around the league and mentions as a longshot candidate for Coach of the Year. Lamar Odom has continued to show star quality, even in the bad times that have come with the unenviable role he wanted but never should have been given. Darius Miles should make the All-Rookie team. Jeff McInnis should get mentions in any discussion about Most Improved Player.

And that's not even the best of it.

The best of it is that the Clippers are a storyline now: competent at most times, downright dangerous these last two months, and gaining attention as well as credibility while playing in the same building as a certain other NBA team. (Hint: those other guys should know by now not to leave the bloody knives laying around. Either put them in each other's back or put them away.) A storyline instead of a punchline.

"We wanted to take away all the jokes," Gentry said. "I told our guys from the start that this has nothing to do with anybody but us. We can eliminate the jokes."

Did you hear the one about the perennial doormat that since Feb. 1 has posted the third-best home winning percentage in the league, at .786 (11-3) behind only the Spurs (15-3 as of Wednesday morning) and the Knicks (14-3, .824). Take their owner. Please! The Clippers are 20-19 overall at Staples Center with two games remaining, the latest they have been above .500 since April 10, 1997.

	Piatkowski

	McInnis

Counting all games, home and road, they're at 28 wins, after hitting 15 last season and 17 in 1997-98, with the 9-41 from the lockout-shortened year between. They had five wins in 44 tries against opponents with winning records last season and are at 14 in 50 opportunities this time, with the Timberwolves, Suns and Jazz still remaining in that category, along with the Warriors. Gentry has the second-youngest team in the league and the best first-year record by a Clippers coach -- and there have been a lot of first-year Clippers coaches -- since Larry Brown, one of Gentry's mentors, in 1992-93. It's not a fair comparison to the job that Chris Ford and Jim Todd did a year ago because the rosters are so different, but it's telling against any backdrop.

Of course, it'll never last. These are the Clippers, remember? Some player will leave as a free agent (yeah, good thing they just let Derek Anderson walk and didn't get anything back; no sense in getting any return on a valuable commodity) or some player will get hurt or some owner will start acting like Sterling. Oops, too late.

	“	Everybody on this team wants to be here. In the past, there was always somebody who didn't want to be here or would be a free agent and leave at the end of the year. ”
		— Eric Piatkowski

The Donald recently filed suit against one of his (many) former coaches, Bill Fitch, claiming breach of contract in alleging that Fitch did not look for other work after being fired and instead living solely off the 1998 deal and also that Fitch got an extension by engaging in a "coercive" negotiation. Anthony Mason could get Fitch out of this one just from a couple tricks he learned from his uncle Perry.

Everyone knows this is a long-held Sterling trick to save money, suing a coach in hopes he will take a settlement for a lesser amount rather than go through an extended legal tussle, and that any judge knows it wasn't that Fitch got lazy in not looking for another job, only that his time working for Sterling soured him on ever stepping into a gym for the rest of his life. Case dismissed.

So who knows. Maybe they'll all have to remember this as the high point. It would at least prove that it could have worked, which isn't exactly a new concept for the Clippers, but the possibilities are intriguing. If nothing else, they should be able to at least keep it together for another season, since Cherokee Parks is the only free agent-to-be in the rotation. The Clips have an option on McInnis, who is in line for a big raise from his current $523,500, and they say they will use it. That's a lot different. Last summer, two starters, Anderson and Maurice Taylor, both walked. This time around, no one seems anxious to leave.

"Everybody on this team wants to be here," said swingman Eric Piatkowski, offering perspective that comes with being in his seventh season with the Clippers. "In the past, there was always somebody who didn't want to be here or would be a free agent and leave at the end of the year."

That could still happen with Parks (and technically, until they do it, McInnis), but that's hardly the mass exodus of past years. What has come in its place is a group that gets along very well, creating good chemistry, and has successfully relied on the resiliency of youth to carry them through the nine-game losing streak of January. That was followed soon after by a victory over the Trail Blazers, and in time they took the Heat to overtime on the road, beat the Trail Blazers in double-overtime, beat the Kings, beat the 76ers, beat the Bucks and, this week, lost to the Kings in overtime. They have had 13 games with an extra period, in fact, one shy of the NBA record set 10 years ago by Philadelphia. Ten have ended in defeat.

No one epitomizes the growing pains more than Odom. He has All-Star potential, but has also become the team leader at age 21, ready or not. He gets benched for missing a flight back from a league-related appearance in Las Vegas and thereby missing a practice, he gets suspended five games for violating the league's anti-drug policy and, in a very un-leaderlike move, chooses to not accompany the Clippers on the road, and then gets hit with another $7,500 fine for failing to leave the court in a timely manner after being ejected, and the team stands firmly behind him. Three disciplines of note since late-January is either a minor blip on the radar screen towards maturity -- Odom, to his credit, has accepted responsibility for the actions -- or a red flag that he's being overloaded with too much too soon.

"It's really kind of unfair to him, because I don't think anybody in NBA history has had to lead a team as a 21-year-old, especially a team that's trying to struggle for respectability," Gentry said. "Magic [Johnson] came in under a unique situation and I still think that his first couple years he was not the leader of that team. You still had Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] and some guys there. Lamar, we've asked him to do something that's been really difficult. He's gotten much, much better at it. Obviously he has a long way to be. But I think he's going to be great one day. I think he's going to be a great leader one day.

"I think it's difficult and I think it's something that he wants. Obviously he's going to make some mistakes. I understand that and we understand that as a franchise and we just have to give him the opportunity to make those mistakes, try to correct them and grow from there. But he is going to be the leader of our team."

Things are in place, in other words. The core of the team. The chemistry. The coach. The encouraging future, again ... The owner. Hey, no one said it was a perfect season.

Scott Howard-Cooper covers the NBA for the Sacramento Bee and is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.