Spurs are in trouble if they're looking past Clippers to Warriors
For all the talk there’s been about the Warriors, and rightfully so, the Spurs are rolling through the league, too. They’re not just great; they’re historically great. It makes the looming January matchup between the two sides one of the most anticipated NBA regular season games we can remember, at least recently.
But before the calendar turns to 2016, the Spurs have a question they have to answer: Was last season’s playoff loss to the Los Angeles Clippers a fluke?
No basketball-educated human being would say that the Clippers are better than the Spurs. But when the two teams meet in San Antonio on Friday, L.A. may have a better shot at victory than conventional belief would assert.
As seemingly the entire league tries to mimic Golden State’s small-ball, all-about-the-three approach, San Antonio has gone the other way, patching together towers down low and a low 3-point rate with physical play and as close to perfect defense as you’re going to see in the NBA.
This year's Spurs are allowing fewer points per possession than any team has since . . . well, the 2003-04 Spurs. The offense, meanwhile, is sitting in third place. Pretty bleak for Spurs opponents, huh?
Then, there are the 16-10 Clippers, who possess an average defense and an offensive attack that isn’t quite as dominant as the one that has led the league in points per possession during each of the past two years. Chris Paul has fallen off a tick this season. Blake Griffin’s jump shot has regressed over the past 11 games, when he’s shooting just 33 percent from midrange (he’s still above average on the season). The bench lineups stand up about as well as saplings in a strong wind.
Yet, after all this, after all the talk of how the Spurs are clearly better than the Clippers (which they are, and it’s not close), there's this: The Clips, who beat San Antonio in seven games during the first round of last year’s Western Conference playoffs, may actually match up better against the five-time champs than any other non-Warriors team in the league.
Griffin has historically dominated against San Antonio, no time more than when he averaged 24.1 points, 13.1 rebounds and 7.4 assists during the playoff series last year. DeAndre Jordan, meanwhile, has actually defended Tim Duncan well in the past. And even knowing that fact, there’s a chance we see him guard LaMarcus Aldridge more Friday. LMA has been a different style of player in San Antonio, but D.J. has been one of his toughest matchups over the years. Heck, Aldridge’s true shooting against the Clippers last year was worse than 50 percent, partly because of how effective Jordan is while defending him.
The Clippers has their own ways of controlling for the Kawhi Leonard factor, too.
The Spurs have mostly used Leonard to defend J.J. Redick in the past, presumably because they don’t want to switch on off-ball screens if they don’t have to do so. Leonard’s size and length allows him both to fight through the pick better than, say, Danny Green while also being able to contest a Redick shot from a little farther away. If Leonard-on-Redick is the case again, the Clips don’t have to deal with Kawhi on Chris Paul, who struggles most against long defenders like Leonard, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala or even DeMarre Carroll-types.
The beauty of Redick’s game is that he makes the defense move. He tends to tear apart groups that take risks, ones who like to gamble. The Spurs are the opposite style, rarely ever jumping into passing lanes or chasing after the ball unnecessarily. But Redick helps make the difference here, too, taking Leonard away from the ball and allowing the Clippers to operate some bread-and-butter pick-and-rolls with the best defensive player in the world making a little less of an impact on them.
Popovich is going to experiment, though. He’s Gregg Popovich: It's what he does. Leonard on Redick has been the blueprint of the past, but it’d be silly to assume one of the least-stubborn brains in basketball would stick with a strategy for too long if the Clippers figured something out. Crunch-time Kawhi could easily glue himself to Paul, mucking up the L.A. offense before it can even think about sending sets in motion.
Of course, Leonard isn’t the only Spur who can defend: Danny Green, Duncan, David West … we can list out the whole roster. Aldridge, meanwhile, has looked better than ever on that end of the floor this season, but the Clippers’ big men have a major athleticism advantage over those of the Spurs. That was a major contributor as to why Griffin was able to dominate so much during the playoff series this past spring.
A Clippers victory Friday is far from a guarantee, if only because Leonard — who’s become, at worst, one of the NBA’s 10 best players — gets to go up against the Clippers’ questionable wing defenders for a whole game. And who knows, given coach Doc Rivers’ propensity to pull and push him from lineup to lineup, if Lance Stephenson will even play in this one?
The shining beacon for the Clips is their core. Lineups with Paul, Redick, Griffin and Jordan are outscoring opponents by an absolutely dominant 14.9 points per 100 possessions. But we might not see that group enough for the Clips to come out on top. The Clippers are on the first night of a road back-to-back, possibly the biggest obstacle to overcome against San Antonio. Rivers may not want to have his starters eat up a gluttonous amount of minutes before the team heads to Houston for a Saturday evening game.
Because of that, along with a bench that vastly outdoes the Clippers', the Spurs could pull away. But if L.A. goes all out with the first unit, don’t be surprised to see the Clips hang in there against a superior team. That's true on Friday, and it'll still be true in the postseason.
Fred Katz covers the NBA for FOX Sports. Follow him on Twitter: @FredKatz.
