LOS ANGELES — The LA Clippers started the month of November down 91-82 with 2:24 left to play. Shots weren’t falling — again. They were spending most of the second half trying to overcome a deficit of at least 15 points — again. And they looked like they were going to wear Paul George out — again.
Clippers head coach Tyronn Lue was pulling out all the stops: small lineups, quirky defenses, etc. Lue shortened his rotation. He used a coach’s challenge for the first time all season.
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Something clicked in the final minutes, and the Clippers scored on their last seven possessions as part of a 17-3 run to get a much-needed 99-94 win. George overcame a scoreless first quarter to finish with a game-high 32 points, eight of which came in that final stretch. He also did everything else in 40 minutes: nine rebounds, seven assists, three steals and one block. George embraced Reggie Jackson, who overcame another subpar shooting night to finish a tough floater with 36.7 seconds left and ice the game at the free-throw line. George played a season-high 40:23. It felt like a playoff game from June, a month that saw the Clippers play 15 of those in 30 days in 2021.
.@Yg_Trece and @Reggie_Jackson close it out for the W. pic.twitter.com/2WLADKEhfu
— LA Clippers (@LAClippers) November 2, 2021
But this was just a Monday night against the Oklahoma City Thunder, the team that controls the next five Clippers drafts and would be winless if not for a 26-point blown lead by the Los Angeles Lakers in Week 2.
“It’s an ugly win,” Nicolas Batum said. “But I’ll take an ugly win compared to beautiful losses.”
“Shit, I’ll don’t care if we win 4-3, I’ll take it,” Lue said, shaking his head as if he discovered more gray hairs on his head prior to entering the press room.
“Like I said last game, it’s my job,” said George, who joined the postgame media while noting he was in the middle of his intense routine he uses to recover after games.
“I don’t know,” said Jackson, who was dumbfounded by the Clippers needing a hot finish to complete the game at 38 percent from the field and 35.7 percent from 3. “I think Halloween has stuck with us. I don’t know. It feels like it’s been like that all season so far.”
Ah, but it’s not Halloween anymore. The month of October, one that saw the Clippers sleepwalk through a 1-3 preseason before getting off to a 1-4 start, is over. That should be a good thing for the Clippers, as they ended October with woeful shooting and rebounding marks.
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But you know what else October had? Days off. Plenty of them. The Clippers broke camp in San Diego and played all four of their preseason games within an eight-day span. They had the most days off of any team in between the end of the preseason and their regular-season opener. The only time the Clippers traveled outside of the Pacific Time Zone in October was to play in Dallas on the first Friday of the preseason. They haven’t had any back-to-backs yet. Even after Friday’s fright night at Portland, the Clippers got two days to rest.
The only part of the November schedule for the Clippers with back-to-back days off will be Thanksgiving and the day before. The Clippers may be off to a rough start, but that was only a five-game October; they have more than three times that many games in a 16-game November.
“It is what it is,” Lue said Sunday of the Clippers’ heavy schedule in November. “I think we got used to it last year in the playoffs; we did it for a long stretch. So the schedule is what it is, but it’ll all even out at some point.”
Teams are still in their nascent development stages, and observers are still leaning on what we saw last season, or in the playoffs. The potential shown in Las Vegas Summer League or preseason is still fresh. November adds some needed ink to the paper champions that had their high expectations set after flashy offseasons. This month won’t define the Clippers. But it will be the month where the sample size becomes legitimate for what the league is this season.
Lue is hoping the Clippers’ depth will improve over the course of the month, though he provided no update on the timetables of bigs Marcus Morris Sr. (left knee) or Serge Ibaka (back).
“It could be OK if we get some bodies back and get guys back,” Lue said Sunday of the month ahead. “It could be OK. Because once you get that stretch, you start playing well, we want to kind of continue to keep playing. So we’ll see what we get to it.”
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But Monday night’s game felt like… a lot to deal with. The Clippers closed the court to have a walkthrough just over two hours before game time. The effort and energy the team said was lacking in its losses was there. But for 45 minutes, the results weren’t, and that was at home with a one-day rest advantage against the team ranked dead last in net rating.
That’s no disrespect to the Thunder. Every team in the NBA won or lost at least one game within the first dozen days of this season. The Clippers haven’t faced a team that won a 2021 postseason series yet, and they’re just hoping to get to .500 by the end of the first week of the month. But for what it’s worth, the Clippers won’t face a team that won a playoff series in 2021 until the Phoenix Suns visit on Dec. 13.
“I’m hoping we can get it pretty even,” Lue said Sunday when I asked him about the parity in the league at the moment. “I’m just worried about ourselves. We had some tough games we could have possibly won. But like I said, we got to continue to keep playing better. Playing the right way, and understand what we’re looking for. And even when we’re not making shots, we just go to continue to play the right way. So I think we’re in good shape, we just got to continue to keep plugging away.”
Those positive vibes aren’t insignificant. It’s how a team deals with the exceptionally poor shooting that has tanked Lue’s offense two weeks into the season. Jackson resorted to joking to Lue about getting him to change the baskets after the Clippers compiled their third-straight first half of exactly 40 points.
“Got a good relationship with Coach,” said Jackson, who is playing a career-high 34.8 minutes per game at 31 years old. “Always a joy to be around him. All these good feels, vibes. But you could feel it. It was a dark cloud over us, and just needed somebody to joke with at the moment.”
November is a logistically soft month, with only four road games. Two of those road games are a miniseries in Minnesota this week, and the team has a back-to-back in Memphis and New Orleans the week before Thanksgiving.
The flip side is just the sheer cadence: Games every other day practically all month, which eliminates practice time. Even with the team getting the day off prior to Thanksgiving, the Clippers will be in the middle of a stretch where they play three of four matinee games, including hosting the Pistons on Black Friday. The game in New Orleans will mark the end of the first 5-in-7 stretch the Clippers have this season, with that stretch starting with the team’s first back-to-back of the season (home dates against the Timberwolves and Bulls).
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It is also important to note that November isn’t the most challenging month scheduling-wise for the Clippers. The team has a brutal 5-in-7 stretch that starts the day after Christmas and features the first of the Eastern Conference road games. The team’s season-long eight-game road trip takes it out of California for the last two weeks of January. Who knows what kind of shape the team will look like in February, when the trade deadline and All-Star break hit?
But the Clippers are at least starting November off with a win. It was a win that took Batum pressing rookie Josh Giddey full court, George having to outduel Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and Lue having to break out his center-less lineup for 17:27. It’s going to be a long month, so the Clippers might as well embrace the dirty work as they look to establish new success.
“We just got to continue to do what we can do to try to win,” Lue said. “Whatever we have to do to try to make it work, we got to do it. And just the biggest thing is offensively, we’ve got to catch up with our defense. I think with the small lineup, just getting better with the small lineup of how we’re going to play and what style they want to play. So I got to do a better job with that.”
(Photo of Paul George and Reggie Jackson: Adam Pantozzi / NBAE via Getty Images)
