The prevailing mood in the Clippers’ locker room lately has been upbeat, optimistic that there was time to turn around their rollercoaster season which has gone more down than up. Just flip the switch.
Reality, however, seems to have seeped in after the team lost eight of 10 games – now nine of 11 after losing to the Utah Jazz on Wednesday night. With their latest loss, the Clippers further dipped below .500 and at 22-24 are eighth in the tightly packed Western Conference standings.
With 36 games left in the regular season and the lineups constantly changing, the chances of an NBA championship appear dim. The Clippers were a popular preseason pick to be among title contenders this season.
“It’s now,” Paul George said after the team’s loss to Philadelphia on Wednesday. “We’ve just been behind the ball in terms of injuries and lineups and guys being in and out. Urgency starts now. We’ve got to start playing with some desperation.”
Some, like former NBA star Jalen Rose said on ESPN’s “NBA Today” that a sense of urgency “should have started when Kawhi (Leonard) and PG first came to Los Angeles.”
“And if we start looking at places to point,” Rose continued, “it isn’t the ownership because he’ll write a blank check to put whatever on the floor and get them an arena.”
Rose said the problem isn’t Coach Tyronn Lue because he’s “one of the best coaches in the entire league.” Instead, he called the Clippers a JV squad in their market (compared to the Lakers).
“They’re the West Coast version of the Nets,” Rose said. “Oh, still waiting on them to meet their expectations? Good luck with waiting because I still don’t believe that this is going to be the year that the Clippers actually make the Finals.”
Lue acknowledged that the team is going through a rough stretch, but “we’ve been through worse and so our psyche is good. We just got to fight our way out of this.”
Staying healthy would be a start.
George and Leonard have played only 16 times together this season, and with guard John Wall out for the next two weeks because of an abdominal injury and Luke Kennard still nursing a calf strain, getting a full complement of players continues to be out of reach.
“Just getting guys healthy has been a big thing for us when guys miss five or six games and now you take their offensive package out and you bring them back and guys like ‘Oh.’ They don’t really know what their spots are or where they’re going to, so it’s just kind of hard,” Lue said.
“But other than that, I mean, it is what it is. I’m not going to complain about it anymore, not going to talk about it anymore, we just got to play better basketball and try to win games until we get whole.”
That might not be that easy. The Clippers play nine of their next 10 games on the road (one is at Crypto.com Arena against the Lakers), continuing with a game Friday at San Antonio. Four of those teams – Milwaukee (29-16), Brooklyn (27-16), Cleveland (28-18) and the New York Knicks (25-21) – represent some of the best teams in the Eastern Conference.
And the other games are against sub-.500 teams mostly in the Western Conference. But not even that offers the Clippers any assurances. They needed to survive a third-quarter battle four days ago to beat Houston, the league’s worst team.
They then went out and lost the next two games.
While Lue said the team is close to turning the season around, Leonard said there are areas where they need to improve.
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“It starts every game,” Leonard said. “We have to come in and win these games and be focused enough to execute and stay strong with each other.
“Like I said, the things you do to win a basketball game is you have to get the defensive rebounds, we have to make shots, we can’t give the other team the ball, we have to get back in transition. Those things are hurting us right now.”
But will there be enough time for them to figure out how to get better?
“Like every team, we are going through some stuff,” forward Nicolas Batum said. “Like we are not the only ones with injuries and stuff, this is the NBA. We know we can’t play with fire all year long.”
Batum said the key is focusing on the right things, not where the Clippers sit in the standings or how many games remain.
“If we take care of ourselves, we’ll be alright,” he said. “The standings will follow. We just have to really focus on ourselves, have championship habits. If we show up in every game, every position, everything, I mean every time like, we got to play like it.”