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.
