LOS ANGELES – This, as head coach Doc Rivers put it, is the “silly season.”
It’s the time of year within the much longer NBA season – this handful of games before the All-Star break – when teams can look unlike themselves if they don’t watch out.
And it’s something Rivers said the Clippers need to protect against, which they failed to do in their final home game before the break with an uncharacteristic loss to the Timberwolves.
“We have to be careful with that,” Rivers said. “The game was just so disjointed to me.”
The Clippers rarely have an issue beating the teams they’re supposed to, even now without one of their stars. Prior to Wednesday’s loss, the Clippers had gone 15-3 since losing Blake Griffin to a quad injury and hand injury. The only losses came to Cleveland and Toronto – two of the top teams in the East -as well as one to Sacramento, when the Clippers were without both Griffin and DeAndre Jordan.
The losses to elite teams or losses without multiple starters can happen. It’s the ones such as Wednesday’s to a Timberwolves team, which entered having won just two of their previous 18 games, they know they can’t afford.
Until Wednesday, they’d done well avoiding them.
“We didn’t play with the same edge that we needed to,” said Chris Paul. “This can’t happen, and as a captain, this is on me. We’ve got to find a way to win, because we can’t lose games like this.”
DeAndre Jordan said the same.
“We can’t take teams lightly,” Jordan said. “In order to be a great team, you’ve got to have focus no matter what’s going on. That wasn’t us. That’s why we lost the basketball game. We had a chance to win it there at the end, but we played around too much and we weren’t locked in. You lose basketball games like this, and then later on in the season these are the ones that haunt you.”
That’s why this stretch of the “silly season” becomes so vital.
Every game matters in a Western Conference in which Golden State, San Antonio and Oklahoma City all maintained their ground as the top three teams, despite the Clippers’ recent success.
The Clippers still have four games left before the break to try to gain ground, all on the road and on the East Coast. And they know they can’t let what happened Wednesday carry on.
Paul Pierce said this is the part of the year where legs get heavy and tired. Players are beginning to feel the effects of the season both physically and mentally, and the All-Star break allows them to hit the refresh button.
But four games remain until the Clippers can exhale for a moment.
“This is the tough part of the season,” Rivers said. “Guys are thinking about everything else but keeping their focus, so this is an important stretch for us.”
