Game 32

6:30p PT

TNT/Fox Sports Prime Ticket

980 AM

UPDATE: Mike Dunleavy aggravated a herniated disc in his lower back at home today, and will not coach against the 76ers. Clippers assistant coach Tony Brown will serve as acting head coach.

The Clippers post an efficient offensive game — one that would have been exceptional if not for the bevy of offensive miscues, sloppy interior passes, a series of botched shots at the rim, missed free throws, and offensive rebounds that slide off the Clippers’ fingertips. Still, they use their length and side-to-side movement to create plenty of shots for themselves. It’s their atrocious defensive effort against a Portland team without a legitimate center, and that loses LaMarcus Aldridge midway through the first quarter, that produces one of their least satisfying losses of the season.

Trying to examine the reasons why they couldn’t defend a frontcourt featuring Juwan Howard and rookies Dante Cunningham and Jeff Pendergraph for 90 of its 96 minutes is an exercise in frustration. Chris Kaman, despite a monster offensive game (25 points, 12-19 FGs, 1-2 FTS, 9 rebounds, 2 blocks, 1 assist, 1 turnover), shares some of the blame. Marcus Camby seems slow on rotations and frequently a couple of feet from where he’d be more useful. Al’s working, but he’s in the wrong places at the wrong times. This poor defensive execution and timing result in a slew of wide open elbow jumpers for the Trail Blazers’ big men. Cunningham demonstrated in Summer League that he’s not going to embarrass himself on an NBA floor. Give him enough space to work, and he’ll get two points.

Then there are the inexplicable results on the glass. Posting a rebounding rate of 44.2 against a teeny squad like Portland means the Clippers give back their most decisive advantages — size and length. Strengths mean something only insofar as you capitalize on what they’re offering you. When you get reamed on the boards and finish even in the paint (44-44) against an undersized squad that has no right finding space down low, you’re not really a big team. If you’re not challenging guys like Pendergraph and Cunningham and making them irrelevant with your superior size and skill set, then you’re not deriving any value from your assets. You’re a small team that happens to be occupying big frames. And if a game between these two teams turns into a decathlon of little-man events, the Trail Blazers are going to win — which they do.

Sometimes I worry about the composition of the Clippers. They’re so traditional in personnel and so programmatic (qualities that help them at times), that a game against a Guerrilla unit like the whoever’s-left-standing Trail Blazers presents a challenge it shouldn’t. The Clippers play quality defensive games against teams with conventional positional personnel (not just lousy conventional teams, but good ones like Boston and Denver), but start throwing curve balls at them, and they become discombobulated. Kaman and Camby get taken out of their comfort zone defensively — and they’re very good defenders in that safe place. Just don’t introduce so many strange variables.

Please take a look at this possession, I know you’ve got to trap Brandon Roy up top, and that Dante Cunningham rolls to particularly vacant real estate on the floor. But the spacing on the right side for Portland is tight and clustered. With the ball in Roy’s hands, you can zone up on the back side 2-on-3 while someone stays in proximity to Cunningham, then closes hard on him if he gets the pass. You’re professional defenders.

The Trail Blazers don’t shoot all that well from beyond the arc, converting only five of 16, but they get some clean looks, particularly for Steve Blake. The first comes in transition, when Baron never picks him up. The second bomb occurs when Baron lingers in the lane, presumably to stay in closer proximity to Roy, rather than follow Blake to the weak side corner.

Baron, like a lot of point guards, spends most of his time playing the ball and is less instinctive defending off it. He’s drawn to the ball, but his man, Blake, functions as a wing on this set. I suppose you could say that, as a defensive unit, you can never have too many bodies between Roy and the basket given the personnel out there for Portland. But the better play by Baron here is to squeeze Blake and, at the very least, make it a much tougher pass.

The one area the Clippers defense proves acceptable is in its containment of Brandon Roy. He gets 25 points on 20 shots, but Portland afflicts its more serious damage on the Clippers with Roy on the bench. When Roy bothers the Clippers, it’s not because he’s beating his man or getting contested shots. It’s because defenders on the weak side (like Baron) are preoccupied with Roy at the expense of their primary defensive assignments.

Chris Kaman and Eric Gordon propel the Clips offensively. Gordon scores 24 points on 14 true shots, though he’s still suffering from whatever it is that’s afflicting his handle of late. He coughs up four ugly turnovers, though more than compensates for it overall. Kaman, as he should against a team with no bigs, has his way on the block and on releases from the post for jumpers.

Sebastian Telfair’s unit isn’t doing a whole lot to help the team right now. They operate better in transition, but unfortuntely they’re not capable of getting defensive stops. In the interim, maybe they should go back to that Telfair-Smith pick-and-roll with Butler hanging out in the corner.

This loss constitues a real setback, not just for the emotional toll of canceling out a hard-earned win against a top team on Sunday, but because the Clippers, with their strength, should devour a team with Portland’s deficiencies.

Game 31

7p PT

Fox Sports Prime Ticket

980 AM

Please visit TrueHoop for Baron’s breakdown of his buzzer-beater over the Celtics Sunday night.

Fun fact: Baron says Rajon Rondo actually got his hand on the ball before Baron released the shot.

Looking at the breakdown of the game by play type, Boston ran somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-25 pick-and-roll sets, a significant number below their average. That’s notable in itself, but looking at the distribution of the Clippers’ defensive coverages in those possessions, one thing stands out:

The Clippers rarely trapped the ball-handler.

As you watch the possessions in sequence, you see the Clippers defense employ more hard hedges. They were much more concerned with patrolling passing lanes and backpedaling to make sure that the Celtics’ screeners were picked up on the roll. This strategy might have yielded a few more shots at the rim for Rajon Rondo (he had nine such opportunities), but overall the Celtics were much less active in the half-court than they normally are.

The Clippers have traditionally been a defensive squad that’s run a lot of perimeter traps at opposing ball-handlers. We can attribute some of that to a lack of defensive flexibility. The Clippers don’t have bigs you can switch onto smalls, though that should change once Blake Griffin is healthy.

I’m not an ideologue on pick-and-roll defense. Context is very important. Mike Woodson will tell you that Atlanta’s defense switches so readily because they have the personnel to do so, with versatility at the 2, 3 and 4 — to say nothing of a 1 you’d like to get off the ball as soon as possible. The Clippers, given their current personnel, would be foolish to switch a lot of PNRs. But if you have guys who can guard multiple positions, it makes sense to show that look to defenses at strategic moments.

I can’t help but wonder if last night’s defensive success against Boston might have shined a new light on how the Clippers can continue to improve defensively. They’ve never been a horrible defensive pick-and-roll team, but they also have the capacity to get better.

UPDATE: In speaking to Mike Dunleavy today, he mentioned that the help off the perimeter (from Tony Allen’s man) played a big role in the Clippers’ ability to defend Boston’s pick-and-rolls Sunday evening. The video certainly confirms this.

Leadership requires more than charisma. It’s something that a player earns when his personal achievement translates to big wins for his team. Baron Davis has been the nominal leader of the Clippers since he signed his five year, $65 million contract in July 2008, but neither Baron nor the Clippers have approached anything resembling real and sustained achievement. Responsibility for that failure can’t be assigned to Baron exclusively, but it’s hard to cultivate leadership beneath any part of that shadow.

Tonight at the buzzer, Baron Davis starts that process in earnest.

It’s not the most balanced shot, nor is it one that would be well-advised in most contexts, but none of that matters Sunday evening with 1.0 second remaining.

The Celtics make some critical errors tonight. A moment before Davis’ big shot, Rajon Rondo misses a pair of free throws in a 90-90 game. Prior to that, Ray Allen makes a disastrous decision to collapse on a driving Davis with fewer than 15 seconds left. With the Clippers needing three to tie, there’s no reason for any Celtic defender to leave a perimeter sniper open for an uncontested 3-pointer. Yet, both Allen and Eddie House slide over to pick up Baron at the expense of leaving Rasual Butler and Eric Gordon alone on the arc. Butler is the easier pass for Davis.

The preceding two Celtic possessions are conservative — even passive — and don’t produce good looks at the basket. Both Allen, who misses a 21-footer off the dribble after moving right of a Perkins screen, and Rasheed Wallace, who misses a 3PA from the right corner, are capable of draining those shots, but a team with Boston’s collective skills should generate better opportunities for itself. Credit the Clippers for defending well inside of two minutes. They blunt the Rajon Rondo-Kevin Garnett pick-and-roll down 90-87 with about 1:20 remaining (resulting in the Wallace miss), then ward off a Garnett screen for Ray Allen with under :30 left in the game, still down three. Jordan closes nicely on Allen while, most importantly, not committing a foul.

More generally, Boston’s biggest strategic gaffe of the game might be its eagerness to play isolation in the post rather than frustrate the Clippers with rotating pick-and-rolls. The Celtics operate a lot of their familiar stuff with Garnett, Perkins or Wallace offering high screens for Rondo, with Allen curling up from the baseline. But for much of the game, they prefer to run the offense through Garnett and Wallace for shots (mostly fadeaways) and passes to exploit DeAndre Jordan and Brian Skinner. While championships have been won working the best mismatch on the floor, the Celtics aren’t able to establish any prolonged offensive rhythm apart from a brief stretch to start the second half. Wallace and Garnett combine to go 9-for-29 from the field in 55 minutes, with only a single trip to the line for a pair of FTAs (Garnett).

DeAndre Jordan gets the biggest of his 14 career starts, and he does well for himself in unspectacular fashion. As important as this game is for Baron, it might be more vital to Jordan. In 36 minutes, DeAndre gets a true sense of what being a starting center in the NBA means: It’s a blue collar job. For every thundrous one-handed alley-oop, there is a mile of backpedaling on Rajon Rondo at full speed. For every gaudy rejection that flies into the crowd, there are 50 instances when Kevin Garnett or Rasheed Wallace needs to be kept off the glass. This isn’t pleasant work, and it won’t rouse teammates on the bench to their feet. But that’s the gig, and Sunday Jordan puts in a solid day’s work.

The Clippers assemble a quality defensive effort. They induce a disproportionate number of low-percentage shots from between 10 and 23 feet, and contest the perimeter with sharp close-outs. And they do it all repeatedly after falling behind, which might be the most encouraging feature of the defensive work after a week when they allowed manageable deficits to become insurmountable in three different games. The rotations off pick-and-rolls are fairly prompt, though Rondo still gets to the rim far more than he should. That’s especially true given how Tony Allen’s presence on the floor in place of Paul Pierce allows the Clippers’ help defenders to move around more freely. The Clips are more selective about sending help for Jordan and Skinner in the post, and lure Garnett and Wallace into launching a barrage of long-range jumpers.

There won’t be many nights when Gordon’s true shooting percentage is below 50 percent while the Clippers post an overall TS percentage of 58.2 percent. Both Davis (80.2 TS%) and Kaman (60.5 TS%) are incredibly efficient. When you imagine Baron Davis in ideal form, it looks something like this game: 24 points in 15 true attempts — only six of those 15 outside the paint. Whether it was Jordan, Gordon or Craig Smith finishing at the rim, or Butler on the final kickout, the bulk of the Clippers’ best shot attempts against Boston are the product of Baron’s execution. Baron’s 13 assists match his season high (W at MIN; W at PHA). Against the Celtics, Kaman helps the Clips more as a jump-shooter rather than trying to outwit the C’s big men off the bounce. Kaman leads all scores with 27 points. Against Boston, Kaman helps the Clips more as a jump-shooter rather than trying to outwit the C’s big men off the bounce. The Clippers desperately need every ounce of that efficiency because they squander 16 of their 90 possessions on turnovers, and cough up a dozen offensive rebounds to Boston, while claiming only four of their own.

Last February’s improbable win over Boston at Staples Center was supposed to be a character-builder, but the Clippers went only 4-20 the rest of the way. This win seems more substantial, and its details — things like better shot selection, keeping opponents off the line with honest defense, and trust — can be seen all over the game footage. Once the Clippers can incorporate those elements into their game on a consistent basis, these wins will seem less like novelties — but they’ll still be fun.