For the 28th time in 35 meetings, the Clippers beat the Lakers. Thursday night, the 118-94 win completed a regular-season series sweep. It was the first time the Clippers had beaten anyone by 20 points or more since April started.
But the big takeaway is that the Clippers probably should have beaten the Lakers by 40.
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This wasn’t about the Lakers, per se. Sure, there are some (definitely not all) people who want to see the Clippers and Lakers face off in the quarterfinals. That would be the case if the season ended today. But the Clippers shouldn’t be concerned with beating the Lakers, a team that hasn’t won back-to-back games since April started.
Yes, the Lakers are the defending champs. But the Clippers have beaten them both with LeBron James and Anthony Davis playing and without them this season. Thursday night saw the Lakers take their first lead of the season against the Clippers. It was 2-0 after a Davis field goal. It was the only lead the Lakers would have.
The Clippers have defeated defending champions in the postseason before. Just ask Kawhi Leonard, who went from 2014 NBA Finals MVP with the Spurs to watching the 2015 Clippers win a Game 7 to eliminate Leonard’s Spurs. Let’s just say that people don’t bring up that Clippers-Spurs series when discussing the story of the 2015 Clippers postseason.
No, the Clippers are a contender, meaning that it doesn’t matter who they play in the West. Their goal is to get through it and win a championship. Anything less is a disappointment. Beating the Lakers (or the Mavericks or Trail Blazers, for that matter) in the quarterfinals and being satisfied is 8-seed talk. The Clippers are obviously past that; the goal isn’t to beat a specific opponent, it’s to end four good-to-great teams’ seasons.
While the Clippers had their best margin of victory in more than five weeks, it was a game marred by a season-high 22 turnovers that led to a season-worst 30 points allowed off turnovers. Leonard and Paul George had five each. You would have thought the Clippers were the team missing its top three ballhandlers. It was the Lakers who had to start Alex Caruso at point guard and were without James, Dennis Schroder and Talen Horton-Tucker.
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Clippers head coach Tyronn Lue was rightly incensed following the game.
“We just were disinterested with the game I thought,” Lue said. “We didn’t really respect the game. Especially in the second half. No matter who you are playing, you still got to work on your habits, you still got to do the right thing. And we talked about those guys not having ballhandlers and they have 11 turnovers and we have 22, they score 30 points off of them. So we just got to be more professional with what we are trying to do and trying to build here, no matter who we are playing.”
The Clippers did come out with the right energy. Davis started along with midseason buyout acquisition Andre Drummond, and the Clippers held Davis to four points on 2-of-9 shooting from the field. After nine minutes, Davis was done for the night due to back spasms. The Clippers outscored the Lakers by 10 points in Davis’ minutes.
The second quarter saw a bench unit anchored by former Lakers Rajon Rondo and DeMarcus Cousins come alive, sparking a 29-9 run that effectively took the air out of what was another overhyped matchup between these two teams. The Clippers crushed the Lakers on the glass and made 11 of their 13 3s in the first half to take a 23-point lead, their largest of the season.
It was the kind of performance early that the team hinted that they needed following a closer than necessary win against the Raptors on Tuesday. The Raptors didn’t have Kyle Lowry, OG Anunoby, Gary Trent Jr. or Chris Boucher, yet the game was a 105-100 decision that required the Raptors to fall apart in clutch time. The Clippers had 18 turnovers in that game and didn’t get the contest under control until they stopped playing with their food. Afterwards, a returning Patrick Beverley stated that the team’s “mentality and approach has to be different,” while George echoed that by saying the team can start games better.
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“I think we can be the team that when the ball’s in the air and it’s tipoff, that we just can intimidate a team just with our pressure, our intensity, our personnel, and just take teams right out from the jump,” George said Tuesday night.
That was apparent early against the Lakers, with the Clippers shooting 62.9 percent from the field in the first half and holding the Lakers to 38.1 percent from the field.
“It was just our intensity,” said George, who scored a team-high 24 points on 8-of-12 shooting. “I thought our intensity was great from the jump. We were in attack mode. We got to the paint, made extra plays. And I thought defensively, we were just locked in on the game plan and just knowing our personnel.”
But the turnover issues were present in the first half, and when the 3s didn’t fall the same after halftime (2-of-12 3s in the second half), the turnovers were more glaring. More careless. Whether it was George chucking a pass over the Lakers bench or Leonard falling out of bounds, the Clippers just didn’t take care of the ball like they’re capable of.
“Just messing around too much,” Lue lamented after the game. “We got to be a more disciplined, more solid team, which we have been all season. Just lately, turning the basketball over, just messing around with the game, playing with the game a little too much for me right now.”
Now, not all turnovers are bad, and the Clippers haven’t had turnover issues for the most part this season. The Clippers are seventh in the league in fewest turnovers with 13.2 per game. The team ranks 11th in assist-turnover ratio and 12th in turnover percentage. But over the team’s last six games, the Clippers have averaged 15.7 turnovers per game, ranking 25th in the NBA over the last two weeks. In that same span, the assist-turnover ranking dropped to 28th in the NBA and the turnover percentage ranking dropped to 27th.
Leonard had two of the Clippers’ five offensive fouls in the first half, which he attributed to “being aggressive, being physical.” But Leonard also said that his second-half turnovers were due to “not staying locked in, being up too many points,” taking full responsibility for the lapses. Those are the issues that Lue wants to nip in the bud.
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“Some of that could be being comfortable, but when we come down and dribbling too much or trying to be fancy and cute, like there is no time for it in the game for that,” Lue said. “So changing situations of what we’re trying to run and trying to do is you gotta just stay solid, and you have a good team, sometimes you can get bored and depends on who you’re playing, but we’re playing for something bigger than that.”
The Clippers are down to only five regular-season games left. Those five games will all take place in different venues, with the home finale Sunday against the Knicks before a four-game road trip featuring teams all under .500. There is virtually no chance that the Clippers move up in the standings; assuming the Clippers finish 5-0, the Jazz would need to go 1-5 and/or the Suns would need to go 3-3 for those teams to drop. The Clippers are locked into homecourt advantage in the quarterfinals, as the 5th-seed Mavericks have 28 losses; the Clippers won’t have more than 27 losses.
Wins and losses are the end result of a process. But in preparation for a postseason that the Clippers already have assured, the process is more important than the results. The good habits that Lue, Leonard, and the rest of the team has been emphasizing needs to be the main idea. Prior to the 40 turnovers against the shorthanded Raptors and Lakers, the Clippers lost three straight games. Even at the end of the stretch where the Clippers won 11-of-12 games in a 20-day stretch, the Clippers were foreshadowing their losing streak by getting buried in first quarters and having to dig out of double-digit deficits.
Against the Lakers was the rare time when Lue, one of the most even-keeled and level-headed skippers in the league, could use a teachable moment and lay in to his squad as if it had lost.
“We gotta work on our habits, we got to get our rhythm, we got to get our flow,” Lue said. “We only have five games left, so we can’t afford to mess around with the game. And tonight, I thought that this was one of the games where we got up early and then after that we just kind of messed around, you know, for the rest of the game, and we can’t do that.”
The bar has been raised. The Clippers understand that sentiment because they know that beating the Lakers — any version of the Lakers — is just another win now. They’re used to it, strictly business. But playing the game the right way matters more, especially in this part of the regular season. The Clippers fell short in that respect Thursday night. They’ll have 10 days to show that they’re over that.
“We stuck together all season,” said Lue. “Through tough times, no one is pointing the finger or blaming someone else. That is the biggest thing, just staying together, through tough losses, if it was a 50-point loss to Dallas or a big win against Phoenix, we just stuck together, stayed the course. We just got to find our rhythm, that is the biggest thing right now. Find our rhythm going forward, trying to get it back to what we had early in the season. And it is going to take a little time, as you saw tonight. First half, I thought we did some good things. But second half, I didn’t like the way we finished the game.”
(Photo: Harry How / Getty Images)
Law Murray is a staff writer for The Athletic covering the LA Clippers. Prior to joining The Athletic, he was an NBA editor at ESPN, a researcher at NFL Media and a contributor to DrewLeague.com and ClipperBlog. Law is from Philadelphia, Pa., and is a graduate of California University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California. Follow Law on Twitter @LawMurrayTheNU
