By TIM REYNOLDS | AP Sports Writer
MIAMI — Chris Paul is going to the Hall of Fame in a few years. James Harden is headed there as well. Kawhi Leonard seems another lock to get the call, and it shouldn’t be a surprise if Coach Tyronn Lue does one day, too.
The Clippers have a lot of big names.
They also have a lot of big problems.
A largely lackluster 140-123 loss on Monday night in Miami dropped the Clippers, generally considered a championship contender entering the season, to 5-16. Yes, Bradley Beal is hurt and lost for the season. Yes, the team is old – as in oldest-team-in-NBA-history old. But the Western Conference is already getting away from the Clippers, who are ahead of only New Orleans on that side of the standings.
“Everybody wants to get a win,” Leonard said. “And we’re not finding one at the moment.”
Here’s just some of what happened on Monday night: The Clippers missed 11 consecutive shots and let Miami go on a 30-2 run in the first half, gave up 12 unanswered points in 122 seconds to open the second half, and just when it seemed there was a tiny chance – what had been a 38-point Heat lead was trimmed to 12 with two minutes left – Miami scored nine straight points in 52 seconds. Lue took out his entire starting five just 1:26 into the second half; four eventually got back into the game, while Harden never returned to the floor.
Why? It seemed like a benching, but that wasn’t clear. Lue went to the Clippers’ postgame interview room almost immediately after the game ended, saw nobody inside, and departed because no one was there to ask questions. Lue couldn’t be faulted for that. But it doesn’t seem as though the Clippers have any answers right now anyway.
“I would have never guessed that they were going to be 5-16 and where they’re at right now,” said Miami’s Norman Powell – who is on pace for the best season of his career, even better than the career-best numbers he put up last season with the Clippers.
The Heat are thrilled to have Powell. The Clippers are probably kicking themselves for moving him. Powell alone might not have been enough to prevent this miserable start, but he’s clearly missed. And there’s already some grumbling around the league about how Oklahoma City – the defending NBA champion off to a 20-1 start this season – could end up with the Clippers’ first-round draft pick as part of the Paul George deal that sent Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to the Thunder years ago.
“There’s a fine line in this league, particularly now when there’s parity and way more teams going for it and then you’re seeing this new wave of teams that haven’t necessarily been at the top of their conferences and see opportunity,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said after Miami’s win over the Clippers. “There’s a lot of younger, ambitious teams. But those are Hall of Famers over there.”
It’s going to take a Hall-of-Fame effort to right this ship.
Only seven teams in NBA history have started 5-16, or worse, and made the playoffs. It happened somewhat recently; New Orleans pulled it off in the 2021-22 season. But only one of those seven teams recovered from such a bad start and won a playoff series – the 1977-78 Seattle SuperSonics, a team near and dear to the heart of Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, who tried to save the Sonics before he wound up buying the Clippers.
“Just got to keep scrapping, got to keep belief,” Lue said before Monday’s game. “It’s not going to be easy, but if you do things the right way, things are going to start falling in line.”
There’s three-fourths of the season left to play, but the Clippers – a franchise with 14 consecutive winning seasons, the longest active streak in the league – sure seem to be running out of time to figure out how this will work.
Otherwise, a team that hoped to play into May and June might see big changes long before then.