EXPOSÉ: Hilton ran clippers for last five years

LOS ANGELES, CA — Fans of the Los Angeles Clippers have long felt the sting of an inept, penny-pinching front office controlling their hopes and dreams. Today, perhaps they gain some reprieve in learning that it was, in fact, just as bad as they thought. In a shocking turn of events, team owner Donald Sterling announced today that not only had Paris Hilton been running the team for some time, but that Vice President of Basketball Operations Elgin Baylor has been dead for five years.

At a press conference held outside of the team’s practice facility, Sterling revealed that Baylor had suffered a massive coronary during an intense pre-draft meeting five years prior, and that he was unable to be revived despite a number of attempts by the facility’s janitor and lone co-witness, Gerry Anderson. Panic – and his unnatural obsession with the 80’s death-comedy Weekend at Bernie’s – led Sterling to concoct a plan to conceal Baylor’s death with Mr. Anderson, also an accomplished puppeteer and expert ventriloquist. Using a complex system of pre-recorded sound bytes, ventriloquism, and invisible wiring, the two men were able to make the already lifeless-looking VP appear alive to everyone – even his family.

“I thought he was just going through a mid-life crisis a few decades too late. You know, just sitting there at the dinner table all quiet and wearing those sunglasses,” said Baylor’s newly-realized widow. “I did notice that his movements had gotten a little herky-jerky. I thought maybe he had a stroke and didn’t tell anybody.”

After a moment she added, “Now that I think about it, I should have known something was up when the sex got better.”

Once the plan to keep Baylor’s death a secret was put into motion, the next course of action was to get somebody to run the organization that was either exceptional at keeping a secret or simply too stupid to suspect anything. The Clippers’ owner, well-known around LA for being a ladies’ man, had met Hilton at a night club and been impressed with just how dimly her bulb burned.

“Our conversation basically consisted of her listing what she thought was ‘hot’ and what wasn’t. I asked her what she was doing for work and she didn’t seem to understand the concept. I offered her the job on the spot, under the condition that she never wear underwear. I took her subsequent offer of oral sex as an acceptance of terms.”

Hilton’s egregious mismanagement of the team was so convincing that NBA analysts never suspected Baylor was spending his free time in a giant vat of formaldehyde. The ruse started to unravel, however, amid the intense media scrutiny place on Ms. Hilton due to her recent legal trouble and subsequent unmasking of the profundity of her idiocy.

“Once I saw her read those journal entries during that Larry King interview, I knew we were screwed,” Sterling explained. “Talk about chumming the water for sharks. And then she avoided saying what she did for a living, so you knew people were going to snoop around. Looking back, I think we could have left the position in the hands of a dead Elgin Baylor and it probably would have been business as usual.”

NBA Commissioner David Stern declined to comment, but sources close to Stern informed SSNN that he is in talks with Mr. Anderson to include a Wilt Chamberlain marionette show at a number of NBA Cares events throughout the summer.

It’s going to be tough for this sport to sweep any nations, but it’s still pretty frickin’ cool!