LOS ANGELES — The Clippers are taking the whole next-man-up thing to extremes.

Beyond the fact that they’ve had their best players – Kawhi Leonard and Paul George – among those out with injuries, and that they’ve had eight players, a head coach and now a couple of assistant coaches enter in COVID-19 health and safety protocols recently too, on Saturday the team’s assistant general manager, Mark Hughes, got called into impromptu play-by-play duty for the final two minutes of the Clippers’ upset victory in Brooklyn.

What happened: A TV in Toronto went out at the worst possible time.

Clippers head coach Tyronn Lue – who remained in Canada, where he entered into protocols shortly before his team’s loss to the Raptors on Friday – was watching his depleted team go toe to toe with the heavily favored and nearly full-strength Nets when he lost the feed. With two minutes to play.

So Lue reached out to Hughes, who gave him the blow by blow of the Clippers’ finish, from when the score was tied, 112-112. James Harden missed a free throw, Justise Winslow a layup and Terance Mann delivered a dagger of a 3-pointer from the corner before the game became a free-throw shooting contest from which the Clippers emerged triumphant, 120-116.

Acting coach Brian Shaw – the next man up on the sideline – found a message waiting for him from Lue when he had an opportunity to check his phone.

“His reaction the other night was, let me see if I can quote it: ‘Hell yeah!’” Shaw said before tipoff against Minnesota on Monday, his third game holding the reins on the Clippers bench. “That’s what I got when I got to my phone after the game was over, that’s what he said. He was happy. Obviously pumped up.

“He had to get play-by-play from Mark Hughes for the last two minutes of the game, so I thought that was pretty funny, that he had to watch the most critical part of the game that way – or not watch it, I should say.”

Shaw also said Lue is feeling well, though the 44-year-old coach is miffed about missing games, not just the final two minutes of Saturday’s thriller.

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“We’ve been in communication, he’s frustrated, he wants to be here and he wants to be coaching,” Shaw said, while reiterating, “I’m just trying to be an extension of the things that he’s implemented till this point and continue us going down that road.”

Because with all the unpredictability of this season, that one-game-at-a-time cliche – and Lue’s one-quarter-at-a-time mantra – is getting a workout.

“We’re not in a position to be able to look ahead or look forward to anything that’s going on beyond this game, this space in an hour or so,” said Shaw, noting that the coaching staff’s depth is being tested as well, with assistants Dan Craig (knee surgery), Brendan O’Connor (protocols) and Jeremy Castleberry (protocols) all out.

“We don’t know who’s going to be available, what positions that we’re going to be down, what coaches we’re going to be (without). We’ve had to scramble in terms of coaching staff as well, because Dan Craig is our defensive coordinator and Brendan O’ Connor is also defensive coordinator along with him and they’re both gone. Jeremy Castleberry’s out. So next man up, Dahntay Jones – he’s taking care of the defense tonight … we’ve had to scramble in terms of the staff as well.

“So, like I said, we can’t afford to look ahead. We’ve just got to fight with what we have right now.”