Against the Lakers, the Clippers won the possession battle (offensive rebounding rate, turnover rate), but lost the war due to bad spot-up defense and a large number of fouls against post players.
Tonight? The Clippers got killed on the boards, turned the ball over too much, but dominated in terms of shooting from the field while keeping foul rates manageable. Chris Paul struggled from the field despite getting good looks off pick-and-roll switches, but drew fouls and came up with some clutch defensive plays late. Mo Williams was big throughout, but especially around the early part of the 4th quarter. Mo has been better as a pick-and-roll ball handler (according to Synergy Sports Technology) than Chris Paul so far this season, and you can see why. He’s deadly when teams go under the pick, and the threat of Blake getting free for a drive in a trap situation means the Grizzlies were giving him that shot.
Caron Butler played well offensively (I feel like he keeps doing all of his damage in the 1st half, but that’ll work), and although he struggled at some points against Rudy Gay, the team as a whole did a good job forcing Gay into turnovers (6 overall, including a big one late). Marc Gasol had a really good game in terms of his own offense, although I didn’t see DJ doing a horrible job (he got some work in against Solomon Jones, as well) , but the team especially did a bad job contesting cuts from Gay and Tony Allen when the Grizzlies pulled DJ out of the paint and used Gasol as a distributor. Fortunately, as the Grizz went away from that, the Clippers defense improved enough to get the win.
I went longer on this than I meant to, but the Clippers did a good job eliminating turnovers in the 2nd half and cutting down on the amount of transition layups surrendered due to that. Couple that with some better offense down the stretch tonight for the Clippers, and you get a win against a decent Memphis team.
