Patty wagon
Spurs ride Mills’ FIBA star version of himself to win road trip opener
Patty Mills came into his 12th NBA season determined to be the type of player few American audiences have witnessed in person.
FIBA Patty, Australian national team Patty, Boomer Patty. Call him what you will.
The youngest of the Spurs has heard Mills talk about this version of himself multiple times since the start of training camp.
“I’m a rookie,” Devin Vassell said. “I’m still trying to figure out what Patty is talking about with that.”
Instead of simply telling what he meant late Tuesday night, Mills showed.
His season-best 27 points off the bench — including a career-best eight 3-pointers — lifted the Spurs to a stirring 116-113 victory over Kawhi Leonard and the Clippers at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
With it, the Spurs snapped a four-game losing streak and kicked off a five-game road trip in style.
“It was that competitive spirit we needed to start the road trip,” Mills said. “To go out there and set this standard for us was important.”
The Spurs did foremost damage from the 3-point stripe, hitting 20 from 40 from 3-point range. Those 20 successful 3-points matched a franchise record set December 23, 2012 against Dallas.
The Spurs’ 3-point explosion marked an about-face from two nights earlier, when they went 6 of
19 in a 130-109 loss to Utah and lost the battle from beyond the arc by 45 points.
By the end of the first quarter Tuesday, the Spurs had already surpassed their output from the Utah game with seven made 3-pointers. Mills, channeling the Olympics version of himself, was smack in the middle of it.
“That’s the game of basketball,” said Mills, whose eight 3-pointers left him one behind Chuck Person for the Spurs’ single-game record. “Sometimes they go in and sometimes they don’t.”
For the Spurs, and for the 32-year-old Mills in particular, Tuesday was a night for the former to happen.
Over and over again. In one breathtaking stretch of the first quarter, Mills scored 13 consecutive Spurs points in a span of 1:51, including a 4-of-4 showing from 3-point range.
That eruption — the longest scoring run of Mills’ NBA career — took the
Spurs from a point down to nine ahead going into the second quarter.
They would not trail again.
“He kind of opened things up for them, the way he was shooting the basketball,” Clippers coach Tyronn Lue said.
After Mills’ 8-of-12 night, he is hitting 57.5 percent from 3-point range, third in the NBA. His average of 14.4 points marks as a career high.
Mills has little time to rest on his Pop-a-shot laurels.
The Spurs’ victory over the powerful Clippers came amid grueling schedule that would see them face a slew of Western Conference contenders in the season’s opening weeks.
That daunting path continues Thursday.
Having already lost to the Lakers twice at the AT&T Center, the Spurs face the defending NBA champions for a third and final time as they return to the Staples Center.
“There is nothing we can do about that,” coach Gregg Popovich said of the seasonopening gauntlet. “You just fight through. A whole lot of
people have it a whole lot worse than we do. So you just slap yourself and move forward.”
On a sweet-shooting night in Southern California, the Spurs instead wound up slapping the Clippers.
An old familiar friend did not make it easy.
Leonard, a perennial All-star who played his first seven seasons with the Spurs before forcing a trade to Toronto in the summer of 2018, was back to his old tricks Tuesday.
Playing without All-star sidekick Paul George, and with a facemask to protect the eight stitches in his mouth stemming from a collision earlier this season, Leonard ended with 30 points and 10 rebounds.
With basket after basket, Leonard willed the Clippers back into the contest, scoring 19 of their 21 points during one span of the second half.
Having brought the Clippers back from 15 points behind with 5:14 to play, Leonard’s last-ditch 3-point attempt — well-defended by Demar Derozan at the final horn — clanged off the rim.
To Leonard, Los Angeles
squandered the game long before that.
“We didn’t come out with no urgency,” said Leonard, who is 3-3 against his former team since leaving San Antonio. “The Spurs played harder than us. ”
The way FIBA Patty tells it, that was the idea.
In international play, Mills’ Team Australia can sometimes find itself overmatched against more talented groups. The Boomers win by playing hard and playing together.
“Being able to play team defense like that just fuels the fire and the confidence for everybody,” Mills said.
Meanwhile, FIBA Patty fueled the Spurs. In another head-spinning stretch of 1:51 in the fourth quarter, Mills buried three more 3-pointers to help keep the Clippers at bay.
This is the ultra-aggressive iteration of Mills that helped Team Australia stun Popovich’s United States squad at the 2019 World Cup.
Mills scored 30 points in that game — including the Boomers’ final 10 in a row — to give Australia its first-ever
win over Team USA.
Popovich saw more of the same Tuesday in Los Angeles.
“He’s moving without the ball, setting screens and popping, being active all the time, always in motion and always ready to shoot it,” Popovich said. “That’s what he does for Australia.”
There were times Tuesday when Mills said he felt less like he was facing the Clippers at the Staples Center, and more like he was facing France or Spain on the Olympic stage.
That too has been the idea, all the way back to the beginning of training camp.
“That’s the mindset of what I’ve been talking about, being able to lock that feeling in,” Mills said.
His goals go beyond simply what happens with the Spurs this season.
“These next nine or 10 months, as it goes into the Tokyo Olympics, I’m more determined than every to be able to play at my best,” he said.
This much is for certain. If this is the version of Mills that shows up in Tokyo, the world better watch out. That includes Popovich and
Team USA.
Tuesday in Los Angeles, FIBA Patty was more than enough for the Clippers to handle.