During this long season, L.A. The Clippers were intensely treacherous and the league’s intellectuals, despite having so many fans and even a percentage of Clippers ’teammates sometimes wondering why.
They encouraged injured players to take plenty of time to recover, hung on to long sightings as a season-long mantra, and the load was so aggressively managed that at one point they were fined $ 50,000 by the NBA for breaking Kavi Leonard’s resting procedure.
All of these are considered prestigious tricks in this day and age, especially for a team with delicate stars. But it also seemed to have an unfortunate side effect: the bad habit of delaying clippers. They prefer to leave their best game afterwards.
They fill up most of the season, fueling their intense search for the Los Angeles Lakers and No. 1 seed.
In January, the fed-up Montreal Herrell drove the teammates to wake up and declared, “We’re not a great team.”
In February, it was Leonard in the rarest part of the spirit, when he gave the command today, terrified of another tragedy: “I mean, now. Now is the time,” when asked when the Clippers would start working like their resume.
After all these months, it’s still happening. This time against Denver Nuggets in Game 2 of the Western Conference semifinals on Saturday.
This is not to be outdone by Denver’s 110-101 win; The Nuggets earned it and Nicola Jokic and Jamal Murray scored 53 combined points.
But the game was exactly 12 minutes long, with much more energy and effort than the Denver Clippers, which allowed them 44 points and a 19-point deficit.
It has long been said that more desperate teams often win playoff games. That podium is the source of the highest price to go for any playoff team that has since lost: “[The winning team] Came out more aggressive. “
And the first quote from the mouth of the Koch Dock Rivers on Saturday: “I thought they were just playing more aggressively.”
At the next zoom over, Leonard said the same thing.
But like the Clippers, this is a cop-out of the team’s legitimate hopes. They are a deep team, with a tremendous balance of depth, star power and pte wit, and that means they have a big margin for error, the widest of any of the other teams.
This is the reason why the Clippers were within five points briefly in the fourth quarter despite being steamroller in the first quarter, Leonard and Paul George eventually shooting 11-of-a-kind from the field. Shameless Nuggets, with their defensive efforts in Game 1, made some double-teams effective clips.
“We just need to play hard ourselves,” Rivers lamented. “They played with a lot more force than us … It’s amazing that we got the chance.”
Nuggets is not a sleep deprivation team. The Utah Jazz can testify that when their quarter-final series game was 15-point in 5, the third-quarter lead was blown away by the Murray Jumpers. Jazz became a little more comfortable, and now they’ll have to spend the coming months and years any time integrating the numbers “3” and “1” and “lead” into one line.
Uta gave life to Denver with that decline, and now the Clippers have again broken down the door for the Nuggets. The Clips have been a better team for seven of the eight quarters so far in the series – but it’s 1-1.
That’s how the first chapter of the upset story is written.
“We have to get ready, that’s all,” said George, adding another plea to the Clippers’ season’s als nuns. “It has no blueprint. It’s up to us. But we’ll be better for Game 3. There are no peep talks for this; it’s the playoffs. We’ll be there for the fight and the challenge.”
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