LOS ANGELES — The game giveth, and it taketh away.
Or maybe it was just that the Clippers gave it away – they came crashing down after their upset victory in Brooklyn on Saturday with 21 turnovers on Monday night, miscues that led to 31 Minnesota points and helped seal their fate in a 122-104 loss to the Timberwolves at Crypto.com Arena.
It was the first time in four meetings this season that Minnesota – and former Clippers lynchpin Patrick Beverley – got the better of them.
Beverley spent the game gesticulating and jawing with his former teammates at every opportunity. The 6-foot-1 Chicagoan whose outsized energy made him a star in his four seasons with the Clippers hit them with 11 points, a career high-tying 12 assists and a couple of steals.
He also helped hold Clippers guards Reggie Jackson to five points and Eric Bledsoe – fresh off a season-high 27 points – to one point and six turnovers.
The loss snapped Jackson’s personal 19-game winning streak against Minnesota, which dated to 2013, longer than any other active streak in the NBA. He averaged 23.3 points in the Clippers’ first three victories over the Wolves.
Said Beverley after the game: “I felt good locking Reggie and Eric up today.”
“We knew that he was gonna be running his mouth, and he did that,” said Brian Shaw, the Clippers’ acting head coach, who is filling in for Tyronn Lue, who missed his third game in COVID-19 health and safety protocols.
“He always brings energy,” Shaw said. “He’s the kind of guy that when he’s on your team, you love him. And when he’s on the opposing team, you can’t stand him. But he knew how to push guys’ buttons on this team and get under people’s skin. That’s what he did, but his energy was infectious for their team. And that was a difference.”
Afterward, the point guard had some pointed comments in his postgame news conference about his motivation against the Clippers, suggesting his playmaking chops weren’t sufficiently appreciated in L.A.
“I have a coach that trusts me,” he said of Wolves coach Chris Finch, who was an assistant coach in Houston when Beverley played there. “Obviously, he’s been knowing me for a long time, since I’ve been with the Rockets. He knows my abilities, my cans – I can’t say cannots, I’ve been playing my (butt) off this year – but my cans. He just trusts me with the ball and I’ve been trying to make the right decision.
“For some reason, a lot of coaches didn’t trust me with the ball before, maybe due to the fact that I played with so many superstars, so maybe there wasn’t a lot of basketballs to go around, but I’ve got a coach here who trusts me, who believes in me and anyone who knows me, I’ll run though a wall for Finchy, so I don’t want to let him down.”
Beverley had something to say about every pivotal moment Monday, it seemed: When his team’s lead ballooned to 20 points for the first time, say, it was when he went bounding into center Serge Ibaka to push the advantage to 62-42 with 1:51 left in the second period.
And after the Clippers’ 10-day signee Xavier Moon (13 points) hit three consecutive shots to give them a short lift to trim the deficit to 15 points – 90-75 – with 9:38 to go in the fourth quarter, Anthony Edwards’ 3-pointer followed by a Beverley steal and a Beverley assist to Taurean Prince moved momentum back toward Minnesota, where it stayed.
Then Beverley sent many of the 15,959 fans in attendance streaming for the exits with a little more than five minutes remaining, when he sank two free throws (following a flagrant foul on James Ennis III) and then made a shot and drew a foul on Moon for the and-1 that pushed the lead to 109-84.
After his inspired contributions Monday, Beverley told reporters that he felt “kind of overlooked” with the Clippers.
“Especially,” he said, “when you have people like Kawhi and PG, who take a lot of credit for everything. But it’s always when I go to the other team, that’s when you see my work with how the team is now. It is what it is. What I do is very underappreciated, but the Timberwolves appreciate it, and that’s all that matters.”
Lue, two assistant coaches and the three players who also were in health and safety protocols – plus their five-player lineup on the injured list, a unit that includes stars Kawhi Leonard (ACL) and Paul George (elbow) – couldn’t make it for this latest reunion with Beverley.
The Clippers were even more depleted Saturday when reserve guard Jay Scrubb was still in protocols – but they pulled off a stunning upset of the rested, almost fully-staffed and highly favored Nets.
But they had just 11 turnovers in Brooklyn – 11 fewer than they had Monday in L.A. against a Timberwolves team that turned those miscues into 31 points.
The Wolves (17-20) were missing two of their top three scorers in big man Karl-Anthony Towns (24.5 points per game) and point guard D’Angelo Russell (18.7 points), who needed still to ramp up their conditioning after exiting protocols.
Minnesota also was playing its second game at Crypto.com Arena in two nights after a 108-103 setback against the Lakers on Sunday – when they were victims of the turnover bug, recording a season-high 23 of them.
They committed 17 on Monday, leading to 24 Clippers’ points.
The Wolves’ Edwards finished with a game-high 28 points against the Clippers. And Naz Reid – who was shooting 34.7% in the 10 games prior to Sunday’s loss to the Lakers, against whom he shot 10 for 17 en route to a season-high 23 points, followed it up Monday by going 6 for 9 and finishing as one of six Wolves in double figures, with 13 points. Prince scored a season-high 17.
Minnesota dominated in the paint, where it outscored the Clippers 64-42.
Serge Ibaka was a perfect 7 for 7 from the field for a season-high-equaling 17 points in 20 minutes. And Justise Winslow’s season-high 15 points on 7-for-10 shooting off the bench was also an offensive bright spot for the hosts.
Otherwise, the Clippers (19-19) got 12 points from Marcus Morris Sr. and 10 points from Ennis, like Moon, one of the Clippers’ three temporary roster-holders along with Wenyen Gabriel (who went 1 for 5, scored two points and grabbed three rebounds).
“You gotta learn from it, like any game, there’s wins you can learn from, there’s losses you can learn from,” Winslow said. “We gotta learn from it, figure out what we could have done better, but there’s so many games you kind of got to move on. You don’t want to be too careless and just throw it away, but look at it, dissect it a little bit.”
And once they’ve chewed on Monday’s loss a bit, what might it tell them?
“You got to bring it every night in this league,” Winslow said. “All guys, even guys that aren’t playing, they got to be involved and not cheering but you got to be engaged in the game … Energy is a big part of that and our attention to detail for sure.”