Spurs show their survival skills
Before the most important game of the Clippers’ season Wednesday night, Coach Doc Rivers warned against his swaggering team’s being overconfident against the defending NBA champions.
“You’ve got to know, first of all, the beast that you’re playing,” he said. If they didn’t know then, they know now. The beast with five rings emerged from the San Antonio Spurs, and it was real. The beast that has survived for 15 years took the Staples Center court, and it was relentless.
The beast will surely one day be eliminated and eventually disappear, but it won’t be easy, and it won’t be pretty, and it didn’t happen Wednesday night.
With the Spurs’ season on the brink — heck, with their entire dynasty on the brink — they hung on for an sweat-soaked 111-107 overtime victory against a Clippers team that collapsed under the weight of their chore.
The series that could have been essentially over with a second consecutive Clippers victory is now alive and tied at one game apiece. An aging Spurs team that was dragging finished the game embracing and hopping. A charged Clippers team, meanwhile, walked slowly off the floor while kicking itself.
The Clippers came back from a 10-point deficit in the final half of the fourth quarter and couldn’t finish them. The Clippers had a house full of screaming fans in the Staples stands, and an injured Spurs guard Tony Parker in the locker room, and couldn’t finish them.
The Clippers had a tremendous block of Tim Duncan by DeAndre Jordan to set up a potential lastgasp win in regulation, and couldn’t finish them. The Clippers had an open jumper by Chris Paul in the final seconds of regulation and couldn’t finish them.
Then came the overtime, and the Clippers simply finished themselves, crumbling with two turnovers by Blake Griffin, another lost ball by Jordan, and then stumbling on what was probably the deciding overtime play that was a Clippers nightmare on both ends. It was a wild missed three-pointer by Matt Barnes that became an open fastbreak layup by the Spurs’ Patty Mills after the exhausted Clippers simply fell asleep. That gave the Spurs a 105-101 lead they never lost and, yes, it gets worse.
Gregg Popovich, the Spurs’ mastermind coach, employed the Hack-a-Jordan in the fourth quarter and the Clippers center made only four of 10 free throws when a simple 50% would have won the game.
This could have been the end of the Spurs. Instead, it might be only the beginning.
A loss here would have given the Clippers a statistically daunting two-games-to-none lead in this opening round of the NBA playoffs. Home teams that win the first two games of NBA seven-game series win that series 94% of the time, so this thing would have been essentially over.
But now, the Clippers must survive at least one of two games in San Antonio while the Spurs just keep building on their history.
Since their run of greatness began in 1999, the Spurs have never lost the first two games of a firstround playoff series. That streak remains alive.
Playing in their 18th consecutive postseason, the Spurs are 14-3 in first-round series. They now have the home-court advantage that could make that record even more impressive.
Though the game ended crazily, it didn’t begin that way. The atmosphere was different from Sunday’s opening-game Clippers victory. The crowd was quieter, almost as if Clippers fans were exhausted form cheering Sunday’s victory. At one point in the first quarter, it was so quiet you could hear a group of fans chanting, “Let’s go Clippers” as if at a high school game.
There was a nice moment in the first quarter when, during a timeout, the Clippers honored Elgin Baylor, their longtime embattled general manager. Finally, he was given a standing ovation filled with appreciation for all those seasons he labored under a racist owner.
“You had to put up with Donald Sterling all these years!” shouted one fan. “Give him a medal!”
These are clearly no longer Donald Sterling’s Clippers. But on this night, their opponent was clearly still the great San Antonio Spurs.