HOUSTON — Tyronn Lue spent a timeout with four minutes remaining Tuesday night mostly laughing, joking with forward Robert Covington before throwing an arm around assistant Jeremy Castleberry. No drawn-up play on a grease board necessary — not with his team’s lead against one of the NBA’s worst teams up to 18 points.
The stakes inside Toyota Center appeared low enough to laugh at as the Clippers won, 113-110, their fourth consecutive victory and second in a row against the lowly, rebuilding Houston Rockets. But it was one more step toward clearing a much more difficult goal, one that has this franchise’s eyes on mid-April.
The Clippers do not want to enter the postseason in the NBA’s play-in tournament that puts the seventh-, eighth-, ninth- and 10th-seeded teams in each conference in a mini-playoff before the first round of the playoffs begin. But doing that means making up five games on Dallas and Denver with 18 games remaining.
“It’s going to be tough for us but we got to continue to keep grinding so we don’t have to be in the play-in situation,” Lue said. “But if we’re in the play-in situation that’s just what we got to do. You can look ahead and see how far ahead teams are and what you got to do to try to catch them. It’s just part of the season. I think everybody does that to see where you’re going to end up at.”
Six weeks before the play-in tournament begins, the Clippers have reason to feel confident about their chances in it.
Wins in six of their last seven games have been sparked by a defense that entered Tuesday with the third-best rating since the Feb. 10 trade deadline. In that span, the Clippers held opponents to the league’s third-lowest field-goal percentage and the second-fewest free-throw attempts. And in stark contrast to their rebounding woes earlier this season, they have limited opponents’ second-chance opportunities by grabbing the fourth-highest percentage of available defensive rebounds.
But this is also a Clippers team whose most impressive trait, resilience, has been forged because of a less desirable habit — often falling behind, sometimes by double digits, early in games. A seven-game series allows for trial and error. Last season the Clippers became the first team to trail two games to none and win consecutive series.
With one chance to make the playoffs — or two, if they finish seventh or eighth — there is more variability and less room for error.
“Being in the seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th spot it is tough because the play-in game, anything can happen,” Lue said.
After a slow start Tuesday, the predictable happened.
After making six of their first eight shots to turn an already third-filled arena even quieter, the Clippers made only 12 of their next 44 shots. During a six-minute stretch spanning the second and third quarters Lue had neither of the team’s primary ballhandlers of the last three weeks, Reggie Jackson or Terance Mann, on the court. In that span, with the offense initiated in turns by center Isaiah Hartenstein or wings Luke Kennard and Amir Coffey, the Clippers scored 14 points on 38% shooting, a number that nearly mirrored their 38% accuracy overall in the first half, to trail by as many as seven.
In the third quarter, the Clippers needed only seven minutes to score as many points as in their entire second as the offense looked like a team frustrated by their last six quarters of basketball against the league’s worst defense.
Six offensive rebounds turned into 10 points. Nicolas Batum, Coffey and Kennard, who had shot a combined 0 for 11 in the first half, made four of their five shots. Already appearing remarkably loose during many timeouts, the Clippers smiled and flexed after making seven of their nine 3-pointers to produce their first quarter of at least 40 points since Jan. 25. Their lead was 14 entering the fourth quarter and 21 a few minutes later after six straight Rockets misses.
Two days after Ivica Zubac played perhaps his most impactful game this season but smiled while saying he’d fallen short of Lue’s challenge to finish with 20 points and 15 rebounds, Zubac finished with 22 and 12. Marcus Morris Sr. added 18 points and Reggie Jackson finished with 17 points, six assists and five rebounds.
