LA Clippers playoff lesson #5: Don’t let a mistake keep beating you
Probably my number one gripe about the LA Clippers last season was that a mistake didn’t just mess up one play. It messed up several plays after it, and sometimes an entire game.
How often would we see the opposing team score off of a defensive miscue by the Clippers, and then the Clips would come down and try to play hero ball to get those points right back? How often did that actually work versus leading to a bad shot or turnover?
There are going to be mistakes. Even the best defense in league history had breakdowns; the Warriors with Kevin Durant had bad offensive possessions. It happens to literally everybody. The trick is to contain those missteps to the one possession, and not let it keep beating us.
Ultimately, that’s what doomed us against the Nuggets in the collapse. Once the Clippers allowed the Nuggets run to start, Denver had already mentally beaten us. The Clips didn’t see it as “this is the NBA. Runs happen.”
Instead, PG and Kawhi took turns playing hero ball in the fourth quarter and didn’t make a shot. The offensive gameplan broke down because the Clippers let a 10 point Nuggets run set the tone for the rest of the game.
It wasn’t just against Denver, though. We saw it against Dallas, when Luka Doncic would pull off some magic and make a play nobody saw coming. It felt like, more often than not, that would lead immediately to a contested shot, or a layup at the rim against three defenders.
The Clippers have been better this year about taking punches and not letting it dictate the rest of the game. I get the feeling that several of the games this year in which the Clips lost a big lead, only to fight back for a tight win, would have just been collapses last year.
If the LA Clippers can keep taking these lessons to heart and learn from what happened last year, we could be looking at our first Western Conference Finals appearance, and quite possibly much more than that.