The LA Clippers play Game 6 today. If they want to advance to the conference finals, they will need 4 quarters of defense.
Stop me if this sounds familiar: the Clippers have shown this series that, when they’re locked in, they’re by far the superior team. The problem is that they have rarely been locked in for four straight quarters.
It’s been an issue on both sides of the ball; we’ve seen the offense go cold for unfortunately long stretches. Sometimes, though, shots just don’t fall; for the Clippers to advance to their first-ever conference finals, they need to focus on what’s entirely in their control – defense.
Since game 1, the Clips haven’t played consistent defense for four quarters in any game. Their defensive ratings, quarter by quarter, for the series look like this:
1st Q: 119.3, 2nd Q: 100.0, 3rd Q: 96.6, 4th Q: 108.3
That’s a swing of almost 23 points per 100 possessions between their best quarter and worst quarter this season. And the 4th quarter defense, ostensibly when the Clippers should be shutting down any hope of a comeback, instead is entirely uninspiring.
Certainly, rotations play a part in this. Some quarters will see more action from our offense-focused bench. But it’s not exclusively a rotations issue. Defensive rating for an individual player is a shaky metric, but it tells the same story even when just looking at Kawhi Leonard and Paul George. Quarter by quarter, they are:
1st: Kawhi 120.7, PG 119.8. 2nd: Kawhi 102.4, PG 96.5. 3rd: Kawhi 97.3, PG 104.3. 4th: Kawhi 112.7, PG 106.7.
After the Game 5 loss, Marcus Morris mentioned that the Clippers were “taking foot off the pedal,” and you can see that in the defensive numbers. If the Clips can lock in on defense for all four quarters, it’s going to make the inevitable stretches where shots aren’t falling much easier to survive.
Now, can the Clippers maintain that 96.6 defensive rating that they have in the third quarter for the entire game? Of course not; that’s a wildly low number that speaks to some incredible defense in the third.
But they can certainly do better than they’re doing in the first and fourth quarters, and the first quarters especially have been damaging this series. Twice, the Clippers have allowed more than 30 points in the first; they were able to survive it in Game 3, but they absolutely were not able to do so in Game 2.
If the Clips defense can come out and clamp down on the Nuggets offense in the first quarter, it could set the tone for a defensive-minded game that will favor the Clippers. On the other hand, if the Clips allow a high scoring first, it may indicate a shootout coming which, while the Clippers can still win it, plays more into the hands of the Nuggets.