The LA Clippers have suddenly looked at their worst in the last two games, including a 91-70 loss to the depleted Indiana Pacers, and it needs to be their wake-up call to snap out of this slump immediately.
Unless we’re talking about a series-deciding result or the winner of Game 7 in the NBA Finals, it’s important to not overreact and over analyze single games. They can’t tell the whole story of a team or player’s performance or ability and they certainly don’t reveal much about the 82-game story that is a full NBA season. However, sometimes the manner in which a team loses is important to take note of. And for the LA Clippers, coming off their first back-to-back losses of the season and a surprisingly ugly 91-70 loss to the Paul George-less Indiana Pacers on Sunday, they find themselves in a brief two-game slump that needs to serve as a wake-up call for how they approach the new week.
The Clippers’ total of 70 points, coming via struggled possessions, a lack of patience, wavering intensity, and most importantly, 20 messy turnovers, resulted in the team’s lowest scoring output of the Doc Rivers era after he arrived as head coach in 2013.
If that didn’t sound bad enough, it’s actually the lowest scoring output for the Clippers since December, 2003, when Chris Paul was still a college freshman at Wake Forest.
It’s that bad.
For a Clippers team that has had a perennial top three or five offense for years, it’s particularly bad.
No, we don’t need to jump into panic mode. I’m by no means getting overly dramatic and saying that these LA Clippers, who are still 14-4 and rank 6th in offensive and 3rd in defensive efficiency, are in need of a panic-stricken approach going forward. We know how good this team can be at their locked-in best, and we have the first three weeks of the season with a historic win differential coming over the hardest strength of schedule in the league to prove it.
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I’m merely pointing out that losses such as these against the Pacers — where they turned the ball over 13 times by the opening minute of the second quarter and shot 31.4 percent from the floor for the worst franchise output in 13 years — should serve as a wake-up call. A wake-up call to show that when intensity wavers on defense and carelessness creeps into your offense, losses can be dealt to you when you least expect them. And against what has been a disappointing Pacers team that didn’t even have Paul George on Sunday, this is certainly applicable.
Furthermore, allowing high scoring totals such as 115 against both the Toronto Raptors and Sacramento Kings, even in victories, isn’t exactly ideal for the Clippers’ capabilities.
The Clippers we saw against the Pistons in a 108-97 loss before this Pacers loss aren’t the same team we saw over three weeks to start the season. Chris Paul, who has shot 5-of-20 and tallied only 21 points with an uncharacteristic nine turnovers in the last two games hasn’t looked the same either.
Racking up turnovers hasn’t been how this team has played. Allowing opposing teams to attack the basket and break away for easy transition points with steals hasn’t been allowed until recently. The bench was never going to be a juggernaut forever, but it wasn’t a disconnected, perimeter-reliant weakness either.
“I’m ready to get out of here,” DeAndre Jordan said after the Pacers game to Rowan Kavner of Clippers.com. “It wasn’t fun. First quarter, we had a lot of turnovers…a lot of unforced turnovers. We just were careless with the ball, all five of us out there.”
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“That wasn’t fun” is exactly how the Clippers’ fans would have been feeling on Sunday, too. Careless is the opposite of what the Clippers need to be, and even though it’s just one performance that was particularly bad against Indiana, there have been issues with a few recent performances.
The coaches, players and fans alike know the team is far better than this. And thankfully their next opponent is the far inferior Brooklyn Nets, giving the Clippers an opportunity (that should be easy) to rediscover their original intensity and be the ones delivering the blowout loss this time, not struggling through it.
There’s a lot of time to turn all of this around and there’s no need to hit any panic buttons. Teams can have slumps, and we can’t even call it that yet after just two games.
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However, if the LA Clippers are going to use what could easily be their worst performance in the Chris Paul era as motivation, it needs to serve as a wake-up call to return to their winning ways and prove what they’re about before careless losing habits mount up.