Rest and Practice Should Help LA Clippers Find Their Ceiling

The LA Clippers season has shown the team as a top defensive and a top offensive team- but not always at once. Those two skills may just be merging soon.

At the beginning of the season the Clippers showed the league that they had truly put together the defensive juggernaut analysts believed they would be over the summer. Per NBA.com’s stats page in November, the Clippers posted a top-three defense allowing only 102.2 points per game. The most impressive part of this stifling defense the team put on display is that superstar Paul George was missing for the first half of the month.

During that span, however, the team was only posting the seventeenth best offense. With offensively gifted players like Lou Williams, Kawhi Leonard, Paul George, and Montrezl Harrell it was bizarre to see the Clippers in the bottom half of the league in offensive rating.

In December, the team was starting to find a balance, despite what the eye test led you to believe. Over that month the team was top five in both defensive and offensive ratings. The culmination of that seemed to be on Christmas day when the Clippers met the Lakers in an impressive display of basketball resulting in a win.

After Christmas however, the team seemed to lack a bit of luster- or at the very least some consistency. Clippers have gone 3-2 over since the holiday including an embarrassing blowout loss to Memphis and a near-loss to the Knicks. In those five games, the team posted a bottom-five defense. During that same stretch, they were just outside the top five offensive rankings.

Over the last two games specifically, the offense appears to be clicking on an elite level. Throughout the two matches, the team scored a combined 249 points. As a team, the Clippers shot 48.9% from the field, 40.3% from three, and 80% from the stripe. Lou Williams, in particular, appeared to break out of, by his standards, a slump in December by shooting 54% from the field, 58% from deep, and 100% from the line.

After the weekend the team has four days off until their next game. Coach Doc Rivers canceled any shootarounds or practice for the first two days of the break, and the team held a practice on Wednesday- a luxury they haven’t had much of throughout the first half of the season. With one more most likely planned for Thursday, the team will continue to build on what seems to be a surging offense while nailing down some schemes defensively as a team. The rest and practice could just be the catalyst to get the team back into the top five of the league in both offense and defense.