INGLEWOOD — By halftime on Saturday night at the Intuit Dome, the Clippers seemed to have the Lakers snared in a trap game. There was no other way to describe it.
The Lakers were down three regulars to start with, Austin Reaves and Deandre Ayton inactive with injuries and Rui Hachimura unavailable with a hip/groin injury suffered the other night against Utah. They lost a fourth – maybe the most critical of all – when Luka Doncic missed the second half with a left leg contusion.
And the Clippers, seemingly, were just beating the rush: Instead of disappointing their fans in April or May as is customary, they were doing so at the start of the season. Going into Saturday night’s meeting, they shared the worst record in the league (6-21) with Sacramento. They hadn’t won a game at home since Halloween, and that was against New Orleans (now 7-22).
And they had their own injury woes, with Bradley Beal and Derrick Jones Jr. unavailable, and Ivica Zubac limping to the locker room with 1:13 left in the first quarter on Saturday night with an apparent ankle injury.
Never assume. That lesson was reinforced in the process of a 103-88 Clippers victory.
The home team scored the first nine points of the night and led 26-9 late in the first quarter, 54-39 at halftime and 77-56 with a little more than a minute left in the third quarter. The team that hadn’t done much right all season suddenly couldn’t do much wrong against its neighborhood rival, which had a miserable shooting night (38.6% all told and 15.8% from 3-point range).
But these are the Clippers, and a brutal season seems to have worn on them mentally. Was even the most loyal denizen of The Wall that surprised when the Lakers put together a 15-0 run, encompassing the very end of the third quarter and the first 4:04 of the fourth, to turn the Clippers’ sizable lead into a seven-point edge and turn a laugher into a nailbiter?
That they held on to win might be a turning point. Or it might just be a momentary bright spot. There are plenty of reasons to argue for either outcome.
And maybe this should be the bottom line: This has been a downtrodden team, it has given up leads before this and paid for it, and to give up that big a run and still be able to respond and lock down a victory might be a message that resonates internally.
“I’m not saying we (didn’t or did) accomplish anything, but it confirms what we know, that we’re a team with experience, just a lot of basketball knowledge, and we understand just the flow of the game is up and down,” said John Collins, the 6-foot-9 forward acquired over the summer from Utah, who has averaged 12.3 points and 4.5 rebounds over the first 27 games and finished with 17 points and 12 rebounds Saturday night.
“It just confirms again to us that we are a great basketball team. We can weather the storm if we need to. We can push on, get in front of a team and take a lead. We just gotta look back on ourselves and try to correct as many mistakes as we can.”
Injuries to Beal (fractured left hip) and Jones (sprained right knee), blown leads, plus the added commotion surrounding Chris Paul – who still has a stall in the Clippers’ locker room and is on the roster but on the box score is listed as “not with the team” while the front office tries to trade him – have turned this into a nightmare of a season so far for an older team that had seemed to be gearing up for one last shot at that elusive first title.
“This entire year it’s like, it’s always something, you know what I mean?” 11-time All-Star guard James Harden said. “And it’s kind of frustrating, but the only thing you can do is just try to rally the troops and find ways to go out there and compete and try to get a win. It doesn’t stop.
“… Just finding a way to win the game, it feels like it’s been forever, but I feel good.”
Coach Ty Lue said before the game that a 35-20 record from that point would be good. That would get the Clippers to a .500 finish. So this counts as a start, I suppose.
“I think our top nine guys haven’t played together all year, so that’s been tough,” Lue said during his pregame briefing. “But situations where we’re right there and just one rebound, one big shot, one big stop, we haven’t been able to do that to get over the hump. So we gotta be better with that to kind of really see where we are. And once we get DJ back and just kind of see a full team, we can look from there.”
The first three quarters might have been more a function of the Lakers’ shooting difficulties than anything. And not having Zubac, Lue said, “we had to play a different style of basketball that we’re not really good at. Continue to trust the pass, continue if you don’t have it, get to the next action. And I thought it was really disappointing in that fourth quarter, just offensively how we played.”
Losing so frequently can beat you down mentally, as Lue noted: “I think when things go wrong, they snowball quick. And then we just kind of lose focus on what we have to do. And so teams are going to make runs. You can’t be discouraged. And so you just got to play through the tape. When it gets tough, we got to get tougher.”
But, he was asked, how does it affect the coach?
“How I am at home and how I have to be when I come into the gym is totally different, you know,” he said. “At home, I can be depressed and be down because we don’t have the record that we think we should have or whatever it may be. But when I come to work, they’re looking to their leader and I gotta be upbeat, I gotta be positive, I gotta get these guys ready to play. So I’m just coming to work every single day and I’m doing the best you can and giving it the best you can.”
Under those circumstances, one victory truly can make a difference. For the moment.
“You gotta start at one,” Lue said.
jalexander@scng.com