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Clippers Collapse in 4th To Giannis-Less Bucks, Lose 113-106
The Clippers came off one of their best wins of the season to suffer one of their worst losses against the Bucks without Giannis. The cycle of Clippers’ fandom continues.
Summary
I don’t want to talk about or think about this game much, so I’ll keep it brief. The Clippers were excellent in the first quarter, fine for most of the 2nd and 3rd quarters, and then awful in the 4th, getting outscored 40-25 and letting a 15-point 3rd quarter lead turn into an easy-ish win for the Bucks. The Clippers did miss a lot of open shots and went a horrid 16-25 from the line, and a lot of that is justifiable fatigue. But a lot of it is the same stuff we’ve seen from the 213 era for nearly 5 years – inopportune small ball, bad shot selection, and inconsistent defense.
Notes
Bad Small Ball: If we’ve seen it once, we’ve seen it 500 times under Ty Lue. The Clippers went small at the 8:02 mark of the 4th quarter when Kawhi came in for Ivica Zubac. The score was 90-84 Clippers, with the Bucks outscoring them 11-9 in the first 3:58 of the period. The last 8:02 the Clippers went with a Harden-Norm-Amir-PG-Kawhi unit, and got run off the court, with the Bucks outscoring them 29-16 in that stretch. Lue said post-game he went small because Zu was slow on rotations getting out to the perimeter. Well, the Clippers’ small-ball unit was bad defensively, and without Zu’s (or Theis’) interior presence they settled into jump shots over and over against the Bucks zone without making the Bucks work much. It was questionable going small in the first place, and after a few minutes Ty should have given it up. He didn’t, and it was a bad call. Will he learn from it? Seems unlikely at this point.
Script Flipped: Kawhi Leonard and Norm Powell were the only two Clippers with any offensive potency last night in Minnesota, but tonight were the two biggest culprits in the Clippers’ offensive malaise. Kawhi and Norm combined to shoot 8-27 from the field, 3-14 from three, and 3-5 from the line. That’s dreadful, and a good number of those looks were makeable by those guys. As always in the modern NBA, a lot of times games do come down to one team being cold, and the Clippers were frigid in the second half. But they didn’t switch up their gameplan or execute, and paid the price for their lack of flexibility.
No Big Takeaways: For as depressing as games like this are, all of the melodramatic “can’t trust the Clippers” stuff just a game after a super impressive win is tiresome. There are reasons to not trust the Clippers – and Ty Lue’s love of small-ball when this roster just is not built to play small is one of them – but hyperfocusing on a single game is not it. The Clippers absolutely should have won this game, but as I wrote beforehand, it was a schedule loss, and fatigue played a big factor. Kawhi will rarely be this ineffective. Let’s just hope this is the worst loss that the Clippers will have the rest of the year.
Clippers Collapse in 4th To Giannis-Less Bucks, Lose 113-106
Robert Flom