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Clippers vs Suns Preview: 2025 Season Opener
The Clippers will kick off the 2024-2025 season with a home game at the brand new Intuit Dome against the division rival Phoenix Suns.
Game Information
Where: Intuit Dome, Inglewood, CA
When: 7:00 PM PT
How to Watch: ESPN, FanDuel Sports SoCal
Projected Starting Lineups
Suns: Tyus Jones – Bradley Beal – Devin Booker – Kevin Durant – Jusuf Nurkic
Clippers: James Harden – Norm Powell – Derrick Jones Jr. – Terance Mann – Ivica Zubac
Injuries
Suns: Josh Okogie Out (Hamstring), Damion Lee Probable (Knee), Grayson Allen Probable (Ankle)
Clippers: Kawhi Leonard Out (Knee), Mo Bamba Out (Knee), PJ Tucker Out (Away from team)
The Big Picture
The Clippers will open the long-awaited Intuit Dome without
Kawhi Leonard or Paul George in uniform, a circumstance that would have seemed wild
even a year ago. There are plenty of familiar faces – Ivica Zubac, Terance
Mann, and Norm Powell in the starting unit alone – but also some new ones, especially
in the bench unit. Also different are the expectations for the team, which for
the first time in the Kawhi era are not at a championship level. The wins over/under
line for this team is around 37, and most NBA pundits are taking the under with
Kawhi’s health in question. It will be up to this team, filled with scrappy,
defense-first underdogs, to prove the media and NBA fans writ large wrong.
The Antagonist
The Suns, conversely, are coming into the season on a wave of optimism despite an immensely disappointing 2024 campaign. The Suns are running back much of the same top seven, but have added two caretaker point guards in Tyus Jones and Monte Morris, two promising rookies in Ryan Dunn and Oso Ighodaro, and a coach in Mike Budenholzer who will push their offense to shoot more threes. The Suns are also, despite being old and rather injury-prone as a group, fairly healthy to start the year, which is good tidings for a team that immediately lost key players last season. The Suns are going to be built as a high-powered offense that should have a relatively high regular season floor, the question is whether they can get enough size, defense, and rebounding on the court to win when it matters.
Notes
Ty Lue’s Rotation: We know who the starters are going to be, and we almost certainly know the first five guys off the bench – Kris Dunn, Kevin Porter Jr., Amir Coffey, Nic Batum, and Kai Jones. What we don’t know is how Ty Lue will handle the ebb and flow of rotations. Will he stagger Harden and Powell to have one of them on offense at all times? Will there be a full bench mob? Is Zu going to get time with the bench as a safety valve on offense? How many minutes will Harden play? And so on and so forth. Lots of things will change over the course of the season, but opening night sets the tone, and it will be interesting to see what the Clippers do for their minutes and sub patterns.
Defense-First: The Clippers have talked all offseason about defense. They brought in players – Derrick Jones Jr., Dunn, and Nic Batum – who are defense focused. They hired the defensive-minded Jeff Van Gundy as Lue’s lead assistant and defensive coordinator. They looked great on defense in preseason. But now the game matter, and all the talk and reputations will be put to the test. The Clippers certainly have the personnel to be a strong defense, but with how this team is shaped with Kawhi Leonard out, strong is not enough. This team needs to win on defense. They need to force turnovers to get out in transition and get easy buckets. They need to gang rebound due to their lack of size and shaky backup big men. And they need to make consistent, multiple efforts to get stops in a way previous Clippers’ teams haven’t always done. Let’s see it against a Suns team that, however flawed, should be excellent on offense.