5 things: Clips grind their way to three-way tie for the No. 2 seed
With a week until the playoffs start, Saturday night's tilt between the Los Angeles Clippers and Memphis Grizzlies was arguably the most important matchup left on the NBA schedule.
This game had a lot at stake. With a win, the Clips all but locked up home-court in the first round. With a loss, home-court would be in doubt, and a likely unfavorable date with either the Grizzlies or San Antonio Spurs in Round 1 loomed.
To add even more pressure, the Grizzlies were playing without Mike Conley and Tony Allen -- and would quickly lose Marc Gasol at the 2:10 mark of the first -- turning this game into a must-win.
The Clippers shot uncharacteristically poorly for most of the game, and the shorthanded Grizzlies clawed their way to a 79-79 halfway through the fourth, ramping up the anxiety surrounding a potentially devastating loss.
But then J.J. Redick nailed a momentum-shifting 3-pointer, Chris Paul and Blake Griffin combined for another 9 points, and the Clips used a 12-4 run to spark a 94-86 victory.
Los Angeles (54-26) is now in a three-way tie with the Grizzlies (54-26) and San Antonio Spurs (54-26) for the No. 2 seed in the West, and as it currently stands, will likely be the No. 2 or No. 3 seed if they win their final two games (vs. Denver on Monday and at Phoenix on Tuesday).
"You just take wins," coach Doc Rivers said. "It doesn't matter who it was against, how you get it. You take it, you learn from it, you move on."
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That being said, Rivers said he wasn't pleased with the team's execution and sloppiness at times, which nearly cost them the game.
"From a coaching standpoint, I was just disappointed," Rivers said. "We made a lot of game plan mistakes that, my guys know me, will make me not sleep tonight because you just can't make those.
So we get that. They all knew it. So we have something to work on."
Here are five takeaways from tonight's game:
The elephant in the room
Let's get the excuse out of the way: Mike Conley and Tony Allen sat out, and Marc Gasol only played 10 minutes before suffering an ankle injury. That's three-fifths of the Grizzlies' starting lineup -- one of the best in basketball. That's also Memphis's three best defenders, depending on how you feel about Conley's defensive ability compared with Courtney Lee's. Despite playing shorthanded, the Grizz almost won this game, and made the Clips earn every basket in crunch-time. That doesn't necessarily bode well for a potential playoff matchup between these two, but L.A. will take the win and possible tiebreaker.
The grind never stops
How did Memphis hang around? Well, it wasn't their 3-point shooting (2 of 9, 22.2 percent), of course. This shouldn't have been a fair fight with Gasol out, but the Grizzlies more than held their own inside: they tied the rebounding battle (43-43), scored more points in the paint (52-40), and got to the free-throw line more frequently (24 FTAs to 22 FTAs advantage). The Clips' backup bigs -- Glen "Big Baby" Davis, Hedo Turkoglu and Spencer Hawes -- did an abysmal job protecting the rim and walling off penetration, and that really hurt L.A., even in limited minutes.
Bad blood returns
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It had been too long without an altercation with these two teams. After battling for a rebound late in the third quarter, Kosta Koufos fell backwards and dragged Griffin down with him. Griffin fell on top of Koufos and took his sweet time to get up, a tactic he uses to annoy opponents. Koufos wasn't having it and tried pushing Griffin off of him, which caused Griffin to lose his balance and then have to be restrained from hitting Koufos while he was getting up. The altercation was deemed a double-technical. And to think, Matt Barnes and Zach Randolph, who each had their own individual contentious moments in this contest, were the peacemakers.
The colossal conundrum
The Clippers' starting lineup is statistically the best five-man unit in basketball. Their net rating (+17.9 points per 100 possessions, according to NBA.com/Stats) is tops among five-man lineups that have played at least 500 minutes this season (the general barometer for most starting lineups). The lineup can hang with any other team's starters -- the Warriors', the Spurs', the Cavaliers', etc. But the bench has been bad, and Jamal Crawford seems like the only player worth rotation minutes currently. That's a major issue, and one that Rivers doesn't have much time to solve. It'll be interesting to see if the starters are forced to play 38-42 minutes each in the playoffs.
And in the end, all is well...
Even if this wasn't the prettiest win, the Clips still found a way to scrap it out, and that's what really good and great teams do. The Clippers have now won 12 of 13 and are peaking at the perfect time: right before the postseason. Outside of the Warriors and the Spurs, they have the best shot at surviving the West gauntlet and making it to the Finals (the Grizzlies could argue otherwise). The talent in the West is so close that it will ultimately be determined by matchups, and if the Clips win out, they will likely face the Houston Rockets or Dallas Mavericks -- two favorable matchups for them. Let's see what happens.
