Hart’s a vital part of effort

The season is on the brink and here are the hard-luck Clippers, of course, laying a big chunk of hope on a homegrown point guard nobody seems to know.

“Who is Jason Hart?”

On a busy downtown street corner, you stop 20 people and ask them.

Twenty people stare back, eyes blank. Some turn the question on its heels. “Uh, who is Jason Hart?”

There he is, down on the court, in his low, determined crouch. It is part of what he is, what has made him a Clipper and kept him in the NBA.

This is a typical game. Nothing pretty. He starts and brings the ball up court and prowls for an open man. He doesn’t shoot much and his jump shot is a screwball. But he finds a way to score, and he’s poised and unafraid to bark teammates into the right positions, even though he is new here; he came to the Clippers in early March as an emergency fill-in.

The game ends. On this night, a victory. The Clippers are 9-6 since Hart mastered the playbook. They remain maddeningly inconsistent, coming from way back to lay into the Lakers and then inexplicably, as they did Sunday, losing to Sacramento in one of the most important games of the season.

Still, in this bumpy late season, Hart has been one of the few Clippers who can be counted on to bring full-throttle intensity.

Sam Cassell can carry this team when healthy. Rarely has he been. Make no mistake about Hart. Without his solid, if unspectacular, play, the Clippers wouldn’t even have a chance to extend their season. They’ll need everything he can muster. And they’ll need good fortune. A win tonight against Phoenix, another the next night against New Orleans -- combined with a loss by Golden State in one of its last two games -- and the Clippers are in the postseason.

In the Clippers’ locker room, reporters push microphones at a large, well-muscled forward. Above his locker is a brass nameplate: Elton Brand. But Hart sits alone. He is oval-faced, slight and a bit over 6 feet tall. He could pass for an insurance salesman. He doesn’t have a nameplate. Elton Brand is a star. Brand is a new Bentley. You notice him. Hart is a Celica with 100,000 miles. Easy to overlook but determined to keep running.

Hart looks you in the eye and takes his time when he speaks. A deeply religious man, he speaks quietly and doesn’t utter even the smallest slice of a curse word. He’s just happy that someone wants to talk to him. And he’s happy about his good fortune with the Clippers.

“Man, I just feel blessed,” he says. “Just going to try to ride this as long as I can. Lucky to be here.”

Doubly lucky. He’s from the hardest, most bedeviling part of nearby South Central. His mom lives off 70th and Western, and his dad only a few blocks away. These are well-tended neighborhoods, full of people who work hard and do what’s right. But in a flash, a few knuckleheads can turn them deadly.

From his youth to now he has known at least two dozen people from that neighborhood who were killed. When he was a teenager, he was at a basketball game when his best friend was shot to death on Hart’s block. “If I wasn’t at that game, I would have been with him when the shooting started,” he says, shaking his head.

Hart says he survived because he had support. He had coaches and a grandfather and brothers who cared. He had a mother, Deborah, who pushed and kept him safe and talked about college, and a math teacher who took him to the Inglewood library on weekends for tutoring that helped him qualify for Syracuse University.

Most of all, Hart says, he had a father who stayed close and showed him the way. “I pattern myself on my dad,” Jason Hart says. He describes his father with simple terms. Hard work. Discipline. Perseverance. “Coming up, I just watched him. I tried to learn.”

Nonetheless, when Hart graduated from college in 2000, his basketball game was left for dead by the experts. They said he’d never score a point in the NBA.

They were nearly right. Milwaukee drafted him. He saw time in one game. He played in northern Greece and for a minor league team in a hillside town in North Carolina. He played well in San Antonio, but the Spurs let him walk. He went to Seattle. They waived him. He started in Charlotte. The Bobcats traded him to Sacramento.

This year, Hart was supposed to be a defensive stopper for Sacramento. He found it tough to play from the bench. “I wasn’t even in the outhouse,” he says. “I was in the doghouse.”

Hart, married with two sons, has always lived in Los Angeles in the off-season. Because he couldn’t let up, he spent five hours a day working on basketball, often in pickup games at a small gym in El Segundo that the Clippers call home. The Clippers knew all about Hart. When Shaun Livingston went down with torn ligaments and Cassell struggled and with their once-promising season nearly declared dead, they were desperate for a point guard.

Hart wanted so badly to play -- for anyone -- that he used his own money to buy out the remainder of his $1.6-million contract with Sacramento.

“We were fortunate to get him, a guy we’d seen before, a gym rat at our own gym,” says Elgin Baylor, the Clippers general manager, sitting on a bench one day watching practice. “He’s been exactly what we needed.”

Who is Jason Hart? You visit the father to understand the son.

Despite three recent strokes, Richard Hart still rises at 4 a.m. each day and heads to the job he has held for three decades, working 10-hour shifts, first as a janitor and now assigned to graffiti clean-up in Carson. He is low-voiced and wide-shouldered and uncomfortable talking about himself.

He smiles when he hears the good things the Clippers are saying about his son.

To be honest, he says, he never thought his son would play in the NBA. He would have been as happy if his youngest boy had gotten a degree and worked somewhere in management.

What about Richard Hart? Does he want to retire? He looks at you. No, he says, he never will. He walks proudly to his big white truck with its paint and hoses and high-pressure pumps. He stops only to add one thing about his son. What he lacks in speed and sizzle, he makes up for in determination.

“I guess if you look at it,” he says, “Jason did take a little bit from me.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Traveling man

Jason Hart has played for five teams in six seasons in the NBA:

*--* SEASON TEAM G PPG AST 2000-01 Milwaukee 1 2.0 1.0 2001-02 San Antonio 10 2.6 1.2 2003-04 San Antonio 53 3.3 1.5 2004-05 Charlotte 74 9.5 5.0 2005-06 Sacramento 66 3.3 1.1 2006-07 Sacramento 13 3.3 0.8 2006-07 Clippers 21 9.1 4.0 Total 238 5.7 2.6

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Source: NBA

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Los Angeles Times

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West playoff race

The Lakers clinched a playoff spot Sunday but can still drop to eighth if they lose their last game and Golden State wins its last two. The Clippers, who hold the tiebreaker over the Warriors, need to win their last two and hope the Warriors lose. Remaining schedule for each:

LAKERS

(41-40)

* Position: 7th

* Schedule: Wednesday at Sacramento, 7 p.m.

GOLDEN STATE

(40-40)

* Position: 8th

* Schedule: Tonight vs. Dallas, 7:30; Wednesday at Portland, 7 p.m.

CLIPPERS

(39-41)

* Position: 9th

* Schedule: Tonight at Phoenix, 7; Wednesday vs. New Orleans, 7:30 p.m.