Clippers look to reestablish earlier good habits
Time will tell, but perhaps the All-Star break came just when the Clippers needed it.
“It came at kind of a perfect time, actually,” Clippers coach Tyronn Lue said Wednesday, via Zoom, before practice. “Just get our guys healthy, just get away from the game a little bit, take a step back and see what we can do better and what we need to work on.”
Lue’s team faded late in the first half of his first season at the helm, limping into the midseason respite having lost three consecutive games for the first time, and six of their past nine contests.
So often an exemplary offense before intermission, in those last nine games, the Clippers’ scoring slowed way down: They averaged 110.8 points per game (18th in the league), shot 47.6% from the field (11th) and shot a relatively pedestrian 40.3% from 3-point range (sixth).
That stall left the Clippers 24-13 overall and sitting in fourth place in the Western Conference, four games behind the firstplace Utah Jazz.
That’s hardly the end of the world.
“We’re just only a game and a half out of second place,” said Lue, who began practice Wednesday with a full roster — including Marcus Morris Sr., who missed the Clippers’ last game with a concussion.
“We put ourselves in a good position but we know we got to be ready going into the second half.”
The key for the secondhalf pre-playoff push, Lue said, will be to re-establish the good defensive habits that got them going early in the season before Paul George missed seven consecutive games in February with a toe injury.
“Get back to doing what we were doing early on,” Lue said. “When PG got hurt, it kind of took us away from how we have been playing and the style we have been playing. So (it’s a matter of) just continuing to get back to that offensively and defensively, just taking the challenge on a night-to-night basis. When you get stops early, we are better offensively as well.”
For his part, Lue isn’t in the habit of veering sharply when things don’t go as planned (see: the Clippers’ franchise-record 124-73 loss to Dallas three games into his tenure as the Clippers’ head coach; in response, he turned up the music and cued up shooting games at practice the next day).
It seems then, that after things went pretty much as the Clippers wanted for much of the first half, they’re primed to stay the course in the second half, which begins tonight when they host the Golden State Warriors at Staples Center.
Take away the momentum-sapping stretch before the All-Star break and the Clippers had proved themselves an offensively adept, veteran unit with depth and a healthy, motivated superstar duo. In 558 total minutes together on the
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court this season, Kawhi Leonard and George have a net rating of plus 17.5.
On a mission to prove himself after last season’s dismal postseason, George is averaging a career-best 5.4 assists and shooting a personal-best 49.9% from the field and 45% from 3-point range.
Meanwhile, Leonard’s 4.9 assists per game are equal to last season’s career-high, while his 26.6 points, 51.1 field goal shooting percentage and 38.7 3-point shooting percentage all measure as the second-best rates of his career.
With their All-Stars leading the charge, Clippers were averaging 116.1 points through their first 29 games, when they shot 48.7% from the field and shot 3s at a league-best 42.4% clip.
Lue sensed that the Clippers’ defense had a hand in that. In their first 29 games, their defensive rating of 110.6 was 12th-best in the league. That slipped to 111.5 in the bumpy ninegame stretch to close the first half. And as they stumbled, undermanned, into the break, that defensive rating shot up to 118.4 in the Clippers’ last three losses.
Terance Mann is in only his second NBA season, but he understands that rough patches come with the territory — making the timing of the All-Star break potentially all the more opportune.
“It’s the NBA, it happens,” said Mann, who proved himself a versatile, high-energy reserve in the first half. “We just gotta look to get this (half) started on the right note.
“I’d say more physically than anything, just being able to have that little break … especially this season, every other day is a game, sometimes back to back,” Mann added, noting that “for us going into the second half of the season, I would just say be locked in every game. Night in, night out, ’cause next after this is the playoffs, and that’s coming soon, so we just gotta be locked in for the second half.”