LOS ANGELES — Tyronn Lue awoke to two missed calls Friday morning.
When he returned them, he learned the Los Angeles Clippers’ leading scorer, Paul George, had entered the NBA’s health and safety protocols hours before their elimination game against New Orleans in the NBA’s play-in tournament.
“Disappointing news,” the coach said.
But not surprising.
Between Kawhi Leonard’s season-long absence, George’s hurt elbow, other injuries and a wave of COVID-19-related absences in December and January, Clippers players missed 385 total games during the regular season. Tweaking a game plan only hours before tipoff might typically be startling. So would have been the compounded loss of Luke Kennard, the NBA’s most accurate three-point shooter.
This season it’s just deja vu.
At shoot-around Friday morning Lue didn’t address George’s absence but veterans Marcus Morris Sr. and Reggie Jackson did.
“Just speaking up and saying we’ve been here before,” Lue said. “We’ve got to lock in and win one game.”
New Orleans, though, mounted the final comeback of the game to defeat the Clippers 105-101 on Friday night at Crypto.com Arena.
Jackson and Morris each scored 27 points to lead the Clippers, but they combined to shoot 18 of 44 from the field, six of 20 from three-point range. Nicolas Batum, oddly, had the highest plus-minus rating of 11 but only shot one of seven from the field, missing all five of his three-point attempts.
Brandon Ingram finished with a game-high 30 points on 14-of-21 shooting while C.J. McCollum contributed 19 but only made nine of 24 shots.
All of those short-handed games, those 13 comebacks from down double digits this season? They were practice for their season on the brink, when they trailed by 16 points with seven minutes before halftime, each jump shot by Ingram and McCollum a dagger, only to outscore the Pelicans 55-29 over the next 19 minutes to lead by 10 entering the fourth quarter.
This was the Clippers in their element, their resolve in the face of long odds as much as their identity as any individual player this season. And just as veterans Jackson, Morris and Batum helped drag the Clippers to an 11th consecutive winning season by playing extended minutes and making big shots, they took their turns pulling the Clippers back to having a shot of a first-round series against Phoenix.
There is no timetable for George’s return but Lue said George was disappointed. His message to his star: We’ll win this game for you “and get ready for the next series.”
“We have a good enough team in the locker room, we’ve been doing it all season long,” Lue predicted before tipoff. “We didn’t want to see PG go down, but that’s no excuse for us. We’ve been doing it all season long and guys are ready to play and guys are ready to step up.”
The critical need to fill George’s scoring void was underscored after the Clippers made just one of their 12 three-pointers in the first quarter, while New Orleans made 15 of its 20 shots inside the arc. After Ingram’s fourth basket, Lue grimaced while leaning against the scorer’s table. After Ingram’s seventh, a baseline fadeaway of remarkable difficulty, the crowd audibly gasped.
Ingram scored 16 in the opening 12 minutes, and while he rested early in the second quarter his Pelicans teammates pushed their lead to double digits for the first time at 11, then to 16 as every Clipper not named Morris or Ivica Zubac struggled.
The deficit was 10 at halftime. And then three minutes later, it was a three-point Clippers lead, a 21-2 run keyed by a lineup without a center and havoc-causing defense.
Lue, as he has often done when pushed into a corner in the postseason, played small-ball lineups without a center for the entire second half and it helped the Clippers outscore the Pelicans by 20 in what appeared to be a season-saving third quarter.
Jackson and Morris outscored the Pelicans by themselves, 22-18, in the quarter, with cheers cascading down on every Jackson basket.
The Pelicans unfurled a 14-1 run to tie the score on a McCollum three-pointer with seven minutes remaining in regulation before Jackson made a floating jumper, but with Lue playing only six players in the second half the Clippers’ shot selection began to struggle. It recalled their lost 10-point lead in the fourth quarter Tuesday against Minnesota in their first play-in opportunity to secure a playoff berth.
