Maybe you forgot about the Los Angeles Clippers. It's cool. It happens to me all the time. I think I did not remember them even once between Christmas and, uh, Sunday. If you'd asked me Tuesday afternoon to place the Clippers in the Western Conference standings without looking, I would've said, "Anywhere between third and ninth," and you would've asked me to be more specific, and I would've said, "Hmm, probably somewhere between fourth and eighth, but also maybe tenth." The West is like this, yes, but my brain has been conditioned over decades to mark all active knowledge of the Clippers as a waste product and to scrub it from short-term memory. It's not even that I expect them to be bad. I expect them just not to matter very much.
With Tuesday's performance, the Clippers made a compelling case for closer attention. They fell behind early at home to the buzzsaw Cleveland Cavaliers, scrambled back, and then spent the second half beating the hell out of one of the NBA's very best teams. The extremely convincing win puts the Clippers a season-best nine games over .500, and keeps them within a game of the rising Golden State Warriors, who currently occupy the conference's sixth seed, clear of the play-in. Lots can happen between now and the end of the regular season. The top eight teams in the West are really good. The seven teams below Oklahoma City in the standings are separated by just five games; a proud homestand here, a swoon there, and anyone in there might conceivably snatch the second seed. Ask the Rockets, who held the second seed for 29 straight days then plummeted to fifth, and now find themselves back in second. Or the Grizzlies, who rose to second in February and were there as recently as last week, and woke up this morning in fifth, with the Warriors, Clippers, and seventh-place Minnesota Timberwolves all fogging up their sideview mirrors. It'll be a desperate sprint from here.
The Clippers, winners of seven of their last eight games, have some juice. They grabbed a couple of blowout wins over the weekend against the worst division in basketball, possibly ever, but their 132-119 thumping of the Cavaliers Tuesday night certainly looked real as hell. They've got some killer lineups over there, in particular when they sub out Kris Dunn and shift some playmaking responsibilities to new sixth-man Bogdan Bogdanovic. Bogdanovic is cooking lately: He roasted the Miami Heat last week for 30 points on 16 shots as a fill-in starter, and scored 20 points on perfect shooting Tuesday night. A very cool thing happened against the Cavaliers, where the Clippers would have all of Bogdanovic, James Harden, and Kawhi Leonard in the lineup, and the two bigger stars would swing the ball early to the reserve and then space the floor, letting Bogdanovic operate as the primary playmaker. This really worked! The Cavs are a solid defensive team but are not deep in point-of-attack defenders; with De'Andre Hunter and (occasionally) Isaac Okoro occupied by Harden and Leonard, and the defense generally tilted thataway, Bogdanovic had advantageous matchups against Darius Garland, Donovan Mitchell, and Ty Jerome, smaller offense-first guys who require help in pick-and-roll and isolation scenarios.
A theme developed, where Bogdanovic would use screens or ball-handling savvy to navigate into dangerous areas, and Cleveland's defense would be just stretched enough that help was either slow to arrive or would arrive in such a way that whole sequences of vulnerabilities could be exposed and probed. Bogdanovic would flip a pass to a feasting Ivica Zubac, taking advantage of the extra space to root himself directly under the basket, or would kick the ball to an open teammate, and the scrambling defense would open up point-blank opportunities on the offensive glass. Cleveland's bigs do not often get eaten up, but Zubac made a birthday feast out of Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen, posting 28 points and 20 rebounds against the best combination of interior defenders in the NBA. Through the middle quarters and into the fourth, this was the basic pattern of things, and it visibly wore down Cleveland's resolve and defensive shape.
Watching the Clippers, you can't miss that they are a really well-coached team. Brian Shaw was at the helm Tuesday night, filling in both for Tyronn Lue, who is out with an ailing back, and for lead assistant Jeff Van Gundy, who missed the game while attending to personal matters. Shaw pushed the right buttons, lineup-wise, but the Clippers were also primed in the moment to tease out Cleveland's vulnerabilities. Okoro, for example, is a solid role-player and a sturdy wing defender, and the Cavs can generally trust him to blend in out there, hounding and switching at one end and doing enough cutting, screening, and medium-quality standing to survive at the other. You would expect him to have more value against an offense like Los Angeles's, which features two strong wing scorers who can physically overwhelm Cleveland's primary guards. But the Clippers are an excellent defensive team—third in the NBA by defensive rating, ranked fourth by Cleaning the Glass—and their switching, rotating, and general defensive versatility made Okoro look catastrophically underpowered as an offensive piece. The Cavs need his defense against alpha wing scorers—this is why he's in the rotation at all, for these matchups—but the Clippers used his offensive anti-gravity as permission to hawk passing lanes and dig down into exaggerated help positions, gumming up Cleveland's whole deal. Okoro posted a screechingly bad 83.3 offensive rating in the second half, as the Clippers put the screws to the Cavaliers' best-in-class offense and then calmly tilted their playmaking away from Okoro's matchups at the other end.
Championship contenders do not rise and fall on the performance of ninth men like Okoro. It wasn't this vulnerability that doomed the Cavs, or really any one vulnerability. But the Clippers are deep enough and well-tuned enough, when healthy, that they really do expose a team's soft spots. Bogdanovic became just a guy in Atlanta, where the team's [ahem] erratic offensive rhythm and [ahem ahem] profound defensive shortcomings exacerbated his own limitations. Maybe the change of scenery will not make him into a star, but if Lue (and/or Van Gundy and Shaw) have the tools to maximize his strengths, and if Harden and Leonard are willing to cede some ball-handling duties, having that third skilled playmaker on the floor makes the Clippers into a hell of a tough cover. A downstream benefit of a weaponized Bogdanovic is the monstrous version of Zubac who dominated Cleveland's interior Tuesday night, to say nothing of the preserved legs of the team's primary shot-creators.
And they do have those primary shot-creators, for as long as they're upright. Leonard in particular was brilliant against the Cavaliers. He attempted just five shots in the first half and looked a little bit pinched for space, possibly because he had his biggest helping of Dunn-and-Powell minutes before halftime. At one point in the second quarter he tried to dribble at Dean Wade, in what should be a delicious mismatch, and got absolutely nowhere, and I found myself working to recall how recently Leonard was last shelved with some sort of ankle or calf injury. But as things opened up in the second half, and as Cleveland became frustrated and even demoralized, Leonard just kicked the ass of anyone in front of him. He used screens to get to Garland and then just shot right over him. He drove Wade and Mobley into the paint and dropped gorgeous fallaway shots over their outstretched hands. He rode Max Strus all the way into the restricted area and rolled home a clean layup. When Hunter forced him to contort for a shot in the paint, he elevated and used his outrageous length to float home a jump-hook. It wasn't necessarily vintage Leonard—he's no longer the individual defensive force that he was, God, eight years ago—but certainly it was enough to suggest that the Clippers will be fine, and more than fine, if they need someone to pull a tough bucket from a broken possession down the stretch of a playoff game. And they will.
The Clippers have a very tough run of games ahead of them, hosting Memphis and Oklahoma City before a four-game road trip featuring stops in New York and Cleveland. It's a consequence of Having Always Been The Clippers that no sequence of wins, up to and possibly including an entire era of success, will ever seem very conclusive. There is always some stretch of games ahead that will offer more definitive proof of their quality, probably because everyone always expects the Clippers to do some significant losing at some point in the not-distant future. They've been a perfect home for Harden and Leonard, in a way: Harden because he has always been very easy to label, somewhat unfairly, as an empty-calorie performer; and Leonard because he is so infrequently healthy that you are always either waiting for him to kerplode or making it his responsibility to forcibly remind you of his existence. It was easy enough to think of both players as kinds of mirages even before they became the core of a franchise whose persistent non-seriousness has faded even from the realm of the tragicomic. Frankly, before watching them comprehensively whoop the asses of a real-deal title contender, I would've supported the NBA making it illegal for them to not employ Paul George, for the sake of maintaining the borders of basketball purgatory.
But I'm willing to take the Clippers seriously, at least for now. They looked good as hell Tuesday night. Teams are going to beat the Cavaliers from time to time. Few teams are going to make them look silly and underpowered, or probe open their weak spots with such intention and precision. A team that can do that can do a lot. The usual caveats apply, but if I were a fan of another West contender, I'd be on the lookout.
