Elgin shouldn't go out like this

Baylor deserved a better basketball swan song than to be forced out of the Clippers front office, a move the team announced in passing Tuesday as it reported that head coach Mike Dunleavy will serve as general manager as well.

For that matter, he deserved better than to spend 22 years working for the Clippers and owner Donald Sterling.

In a broad sense, the real shame is that the 74-year-old Baylor, a great and unique forward of the 1960s, the Lakers star who did more than anybody to popularize the NBA in Los Angeles, is known by a couple of younger generations of Angelenos as the public face of Clippers management. I've always thought that by starting to follow sports in the early '70s, I just missed seeing two L.A. immortals. One was Sandy Koufax, still incomparable, and the other was Baylor, whose closest stylistic comparison is Michael Jordan.

Does this have to be Baylor's swan song? The Lakers should bring him back into the family in some capacity. As a Laker, as one of the all-time Lakers -- that's how he deserves to be remembered.