INGLEWOOD, Calif. – By halftime Saturday night at Intuit Dome, the Clippers seemed to have the Lakers snared in a trap game. There was no other way to describe it.
The Lakers were down three regulars to start: Austin Reaves and Deandre Ayton were inactive with injuries, and Rui Hachimura was unavailable with a hip/groin injury suffered earlier in the week against Utah. They lost a fourth – perhaps the most critical of all – when Luka Dončić missed the second half with a left leg contusion.
And the Clippers, seemingly, were just beating the rush. Instead of disappointing their fans in April or May, as is customary, they were doing so at the start of the season. Entering Saturday night’s meeting, they shared the league’s worst record at 6-21 with Sacramento. They had not won a home game since Halloween, and that victory came against New Orleans.
They also had their own injury woes. Bradley Beal and Derrick Jones Jr. were unavailable, and Ivica Zubac limped to the locker room with 1:13 left in the first quarter with an apparent ankle injury.
Never assume. That lesson was reinforced in the process of a 103-88 Clippers victory.
The home team scored the first nine points and led 26-9 late in the first quarter, 54-39 at halftime and 77-56 with a little more than a minute left in the third. The team that had done little right all season suddenly could do little wrong against its neighborhood rival, which endured a miserable shooting night – 38.6% overall and 15.8% from 3-point range.
But these are the Clippers, and a brutal season appears to have worn on them mentally. Was even the most loyal denizen of The Wall surprised when the Lakers put together a 15-0 run, spanning the end of the third quarter and the first 4:04 of the fourth, slicing the Clippers’ sizable lead to seven points and turning a laugher into a nail-biter?
That they held on to win might be a turning point. Or it might be a fleeting bright spot. There are reasons to argue for either outcome.
Perhaps this is the bottom line: This has been a downtrodden team. It has surrendered leads before and paid for it. To absorb a run of that magnitude and still respond and lock down a victory could be a message that resonates internally.
“I’m not saying we (didn’t or did) accomplish anything, but it confirms what we know, that we’re a team with experience, just a lot of basketball knowledge, and we understand just the flow of the game is up and down,” said John Collins, the 6-foot-9 forward acquired over the summer from Utah, who has averaged 12.3 points and 4.5 rebounds through the first 27 games and finished with 17 points and 12 rebounds Saturday night.
“It just confirms again to us that we are a great basketball team. We can weather the storm if we need to. We can push on, get in front of a team and take a lead. We just gotta look back on ourselves and try to correct as many mistakes as we can.”
Injuries to Beal (fractured left hip) and Jones (sprained right knee), blown leads, and the added commotion surrounding Chris Paul – who still has a stall in the Clippers’ locker room and remains on the roster but is listed on the box score as “not with the team” while the front office explores trade options – have turned the season into a nightmare so far for an aging team that once seemed poised for one last shot at its elusive first title.
“This entire year it’s like, it’s always something, you know what I mean?” 11-time All-Star guard James Harden said. “And it’s kind of frustrating, but the only thing you can do is just try to rally the troops and find ways to go out there and compete and try to get a win. It doesn’t stop.
“Just finding a way to win the game, it feels like it’s been forever, but I feel good.”
Coach Ty Lue said before the game that a 35-20 finish from this point would be acceptable, which would get the Clippers to .500. This, then, counts as a start.
“I think our top nine guys haven’t played together all year, so that’s been tough,” Lue said during his pregame briefing. “But situations where we’re right there and just one rebound, one big shot, one big stop, we haven’t been able to do that to get over the hump. So we gotta be better with that to kind of really see where we are. And once we get DJ back and just kind of see a full team, we can look from there.”
The first three quarters may have been more a function of the Lakers’ shooting struggles than anything else. And without Zubac, Lue said, “We had to play a different style of basketball that we’re not really good at. Continue to trust the pass; continue if you don’t have it; get to the next action. And I thought it was really disappointing in that fourth quarter, just offensively how we played.”
Losing so frequently can take a mental toll, as Lue noted.
“I think when things go wrong, they snowball quick. And then we just kind of lose focus on what we have to do. And so teams are going to make runs. You can’t be discouraged. And so you just got to play through the tape. When it gets tough, we got to get tougher.”
Asked how that affects him as a coach, Lue paused.
“How I am at home and how I have to be when I come into the gym is totally different,” he said. “At home, I can be depressed and be down because we don’t have the record that we think we should have or whatever it may be. But when I come to work, they’re looking to their leader, and I gotta be upbeat, I gotta be positive, I gotta get these guys ready to play. So I’m just coming to work every single day, and I’m doing the best you can and giving it the best you can.”
Under those circumstances, one victory really can make a difference – at least for the moment.
“You gotta start at one,” Lue said.