Joe Murphy/NBAE/Getty Images
Memphis Grizzlies at Los Angeles Clippers
7:30 p.m.
Fox Sports Prime Ticket
KFWB 980 AM
ClipperBlog’s Charlie Widdoes, Jovan Buha and Breene Murphy preview the matchup with the red-hot Grizzlies.
Ed Note: I’ll spare you guys the Star Wars comparisons this time. You can hear me Jar Jar Binks the whole thing in the last segment of ClipperBlogLive. It was as awful as it sounds, but hopefully still entertaining. — D.J.
How you view this game largely depends on whether or not you’ve fully adapted to the new Clippers psyche. Let’s break this thing down with the two different viewpoints.
With Chris Paul back in the lineup, the Clippers lost 96-91.
Here’s an excerpt from Kevin Arnovitz’s excellent piece over at ESPNLA.com:
Before he made Mozgov a verb and before the nightly media scrum around his locker swelled to a pyramidal mass, Blake Griffin was contemplating what it would mean to be another in a procession of draft busts. He was killing time at movie theaters on Los Angeles’ Westside between rehab sessions on his left knee, cursing the snarl of traffic in his new hometown and basically managing his misery.
Sooner or later the Clippers were going to get burned. It’s not that they’ve been playing poorly as a team, it’s just that their way of winning games felt a little unsustainable. To use our most recent popular term here (move over, glue guy!), the Clippers offensive performances without Chris Paul have been a little bit of “fool’s gold.”
The Clippers are a jump-shooting team. That’s their identity right now. According to HoopData.com, the Clippers lead the league in shot attempts beyond 16-feet. It’s what this roster is built to do. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it does put the team in an awkward position when the shots from the perimeter stop falling.
The setting is modern day Los Angeles, inside a building begrudgingly shared by diametrically opposed basketball teams.
Exposition:
After playing three games in four nights, the Los Angeles Lakers are a bit weary. They are carried into the game by their aging yet rejuvenated superstar, Kobe Bryant, who has scored at least 40-points in three straight contests and has looked dominant doing it. Their opponent — the Los Angeles Clippers — are on a streak of their own after defeating the league’s best team in the Miami Heat. Even without sharpshooter Mo Williams, morale runs high leading up to the battle for Los Angeles.