Clippers find way to slow down Mitchell
Donovan Mitchell was no longer playing solo on the Bonneville Salt Flats.
Paul George was no longer playing against his own shadows.
Kawhi Leonard was no longer using the Oliver Twist approach, taking only what he was given.
It leads to the type of Western Conference semifinal series that the Clippers were hoping to create, after they left the Utah beehive trailing 0-2. A longer one.
The first step was a smooth and ruthless 132-106 victory over the Jazz in Game 3, the type of pattern-snapping game that Denver, on its homecourt, couldn’t muster against Phoenix on Friday night.
That series is 3-0 for the Suns, but Utah’s lead is 2-1 with Game 4 on Monday, and with Mitchell leaving the sideline with an icedup foot, after he appeared to get kicked by teammate Derrick Favors as he got to the rim in the fourth quarter.
Mitchell had a wideopen test track in Games 1 and 2 and created sonic booms. He hit 44.4% of his 3-pointers, averaged 41 points, and seemed to gain width and length with each loud basket.
Coach Ty Lue idly wondered what might happen if the Clippers agreed to play some, you know, defense. We say the great players are unstoppable, but they aren’t impregnable. They can be rattled and disrupted and forced into unfamiliar rhythms. Success or failure, when dealing with Mitchell, Luka Doncic or Devin Booker, is measured on the scoreboard, not the stat report.
On Saturday the Clippers ran two defenders at
Mitchell as the shot clock got below certain levels. They greeted him as soon as he entered the offensive zone. They handed Mitchell off to each other and gave him little time to size up a mismatch. After the first quarter he had zero points and the Clippers led by four.
“You want to make him play in a crowd,” Clippers guard Reggie Jackson said. “We all know how he can explode. We found another way to load up on him, to reduce his usage. He’s going to attack all night, so it was a way to limit how many times he could play one-onone.”
Nothing works forever, of course. Mitchell got his first basket, a 2-pointer, with 7:35 left in the second quarter. Unbound, he popped two 3-pointers after that and had 16 points by halftime. But the Clippers showed they’d rather have Mitchell scrap for difficult “twos,” bracketed by black jerseys, than to shoot 3-pointers in desolation.
Mitchell wound up with 30 points but needed 24 attempts, and he shot 5 for 9
Utah’s Donovan Mitchell, with the ball, scored 30 points, but needed 24 shots to do so in Saturday’s playoff game.
from 3-point range. With Jordan Clarkson missing 11 of 16 shots and Bojan Bogdanovic being removed from the game entirely, that was enough to make Lue almost happy.
“We made some mistakes with our rotations,” Lue said. “The first few minutes, we made three mistakes right off the bat against Joe Ingles and it cost us nine points.
“But I thought we at least made Mitchell earn what he got. He made some tough shots in the paint, had to double-pump at times. The biggest thing
was we competed. You do that, you can cover up your mistakes.”
Utah did find an offensive groove in the third quarter, with Royce O’Neale drilling 3s, but its own defense was pierced by George, Leonard and the rest.
The Clippers have found ways to get under, around and through Rudy Gobert, the NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year, either by getting him out on the floor, or just discovering angles underneath. Leonard was determined to become the second-half closer no matter
how Utah defended him.
Gobert blocked only one shot, and the Clippers were 31 for 63 in 2-point territory and scored 44 points in the paint.
Jackson and Nic Batum combined to hit nine of 12 3-pointers. When such things happen, George seems to relax. “He tried to make the game easy today,” Jackson said, and George and Leonard put up 65 points.
“It was our effort, but the biggest thing was hitting our open looks,” Leonard said. “If you make shots or not, you gotta live with it, but are we running hard to our spots, are we setting good screens? That’s what you have to work on.”
“We need to find a way to be better with spacing and space,” Jackson said, “but I’m happy with the way we protected the ball (nine turnovers). There’s stuff we can improve.”
The stuff inside Mitchell’s foot, and the stuff Mike Conley can bring the Jazz if he enters the series Monday, will determine quite a bit.
But the Clippers at least know something works. It’s directly proportional to how hard they do.