CLIPPERS SHOWING ABILITY TO ADAPT

The obituaries were still being written on the Clippers’ 2020 season last September when Paul George landed on a cause of death.

There had been too many injuries and too little continuity for too many times after using 32 lineups while seeing 12 players combine to miss 114 games, when they’d needed to band together but felt disconnected.

“We didn’t get much time to be together,” George had said, once Denver won the seventh and final game of their second-round series to complete a comeback from down 3-1.

One year later, the Clippers entered this postseason little healthier: 13 players combining to miss 144 games, which led to 24 starting lineups during the regular season. Three starters during the season’s first month ended the season as reserves. And one of those new starters who had emerged during the season’s second half, center Ivica Zubac, has seen his role minimized during the postseason.

And yet the lack of continuity once deemed last year’s crippling flaw has transformed, as the Clippers steadfastly believe, into a source of strength, with their latest example Wednesday’s 119-111 win in Salt Lake City to lead Utah 3-2 in this best-ofseven series.

With leading scorer Kawhi Leonard out because of a right knee sprain, an injury whose severity still has not been determined as the team awaits more test results, the Clippers again opened up their rotation and a lead in this second-round playoff series entering today’s Game 6 at Staples Center.

The difference, coach Tyronn Lue said, was that this team has not been afraid to try new combinations. “Next man up” is a tired sports cliche — but it also might be this team’s defining mantra.

“We tried a lot of guys in a lot of different positions,” Lue said. “A lot of guys got a lot of time playing with each other when guys were out.”

The Clippers’ most-used, and most-effective, lineup Wednesday featured typical starters Nicolas Batum, Paul George, Reggie Jackson and Marcus Morris alongside emergency starter Terance Mann, and they outscored Utah by 15 in 22 minutes.

During the regular season, that lineup played all of six minutes together.

Lue played 15 other lineup combinations Wednesday, none more than four minutes, and the patchwork rotations that largely would not have existed had Leonard been healthy have brought a franchise that has never appeared in a conference final one win away from its first.

George, the All-NBA staple of any lineup, was a catalyst with 37 points. But there were also 22 points from Jackson, who had been dropped from Lue’s bench rotation 10 games into the season.