Balanced melody leads Clippers to trouncing of sputtering Jazz
Eight players score in double-figures as L.A. never trails in beatdown.
LOS ANGELES — It always appeared to be a foregone conclusion; even before the opening tip.
The Utah Jazz, mired in a then-10-game losing streak and counting down the days until season’s end, disembarked from their busses and walked up the loading dock in the bowels of downtown Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena, down the long, arduous hallway that passes by a multitude of dressing rooms, and set up shop in the tiny road locker room that several players around the league are not fond of.
Seven hours later, the room was cleared out after Utah suffered their 11th straight defeat. No remnant that the Jazz had even been there remained. A space left vacant and awaiting the next visitor. The busses left after scooping up the players and staff, zooming away from the arena toward their next destination.
This was always going to be the outcome.
Despite the LA Clippers lacking the services of Kawhi Leonard for a third straight game, the home side thumped, trounced, and tore apart a hapless Jazz squad missing many of their best. The Clippers, who led by 33 at the half, ended up cruising to a 131-102 victory.
“A lot of challenges,” Clippers coach Tyronn Lue answered postgame after being asked what the challenges are when trying to keep your team focused as they’re leading by that much at halftime.
“But I mean you want to really just, if you are up 30 at halftime, which is, it doesn’t happen a lot, but you want to just those first six minutes of just bearing down defensively, trying to get stops and playing the right way.”
Those first six minutes of the third quarter that Lue mentioned ultimately went the Clippers’ way, as their lead never dipped below 30 in that time and they held Utah to zero idea of an epic comeback. Lue did say he thought his team got “a little comfortable” after that point, but that’s also understandable.
It’s not every day in the NBA you get up 30 in a competitive basketball game.
“It’s normal to relax,” center Ivica Zubac said following the win. “You go up big and it’s normal to relax. But Ty Lue came in and he said there’s no adjustment. There’s nothing. We just got to be mentally locked in. We can’t relax. We got to come out in the [second] half and play the right way and take care of business.”
The Clippers never trailed on Friday and led by at least 20 points for the final 33 minutes and 59 seconds.
The win moved the Clippers to a season-best 21 games over .500 (49-28) as they look to secure the Western Conference’s 4-seed. While mathematically alive for the top overall seed in the conference, that pathway requires a confluence of events that would stun all involved. Utah fell to 29-48, the eighth-worst record in the league.
Kawhi Leonard, who as mentioned missed out on his third straight game, did undergo an MRI, as first reported by ClutchPoints’ Tomer Azarly. The result of said examination “did not show anything that would cause the Clippers significant concern.”
Without Leonard, the Clippers were led by a balanced scoring attack featuring eight players in double-figures.
Terance Mann scored a game-high 19 while Norman Powell (18 points), Russell Westbrook (17), Paul George (14), James Harden (13), Ivica Zubac (12), Amir Coffey (11), and Daniel Theis (11) all joined in on the festivities. Harden finished with a triple-double — 13 points, 15 assists, and 10 rebounds. The guard did so on his bobblehead night.
It was the first time Mann had led the Clippers, as well as all players, in scoring for a single game since Jan. 15, 2023, when he scored 31 in a win over the Houston Rockets.
The Clippers now have a day off before turning around and playing the Cleveland Cavaliers (46-31) on Sunday afternoon. It’ll be the second game of a back-to-back for the Cavaliers as they play the Los Angeles Lakers on Saturday afternoon.
L.A. has now won five out of their last six games, and they’ve held opponents to under 110 points in all but one of those six contests. The defense has slowly turned things around, and it’s something that’s not lost on Lue.
“I think our defense has picked up,” the coach said. “It’s been a lot better, a lot better [with] paying attention to detail, bringing the physicality, rebounding the ball well. But our defense has been holding us up, and so I know offensively we are going to be a good team and we can make shots. We haven’t shot the ball as well as we wanted to. But defensively is what’s carried us over these last six or seven games.”
Utah was led by Talen Horton-Tucker’s 17 points in 26 minutes while Darius Bazley, Omer Yurtseven, and Collin Sexton all scored 12 for the Jazz. Kris Dunn added 10. The Jazz shot 38.5%. They have not won a game since Mar. 15, and have lost 22 of their last 25 contests. Utah hasn’t won a road game since Jan. 27.
The Clippers are still fighting for playoff positioning, but it appears that we’re barrelling toward an inevitable third showdown between the Clippers and the Dallas Mavericks. What a thing that would be.
For the Jazz, they now go up to Golden State for a meeting with the Warriors on Sunday. They then go home for games against the Denver Nuggets and Houston Rockets before finishing up their campaign with two more road games. The Clippers will see the Jazz again on Apr. 12, and then Utah will once again travel to the Bay Area to play the Warriors on the final day of the regular season.
While the Clippers are surging, the Jazz are suffering. Life without Lauri Markkanen, Jordan Clarkson, John Collins, and Walker Kessler hasn’t been ideal. They’ve lost only two games by single digits during their 11-game streak of futility, a sign that the team is going through the woes that most bad teams endure this time of year.
They’ll return to Los Angeles next week, where they’ll go through the same process as Friday — a flight into town, a bus ride to the arena, the long walk up the ramp and through the hallways, where a cramped locker room awaits them as they prepare for what’ll likely be another loss.
Such is life in the NBA.
QUICK NOTE: I had intended to write about the Clippers’ thrilling 102-100 victory over the Denver Nuggets on Thursday night, but by the time I got home that evening to do so, there was no power due to “routine maintenance.” Power didn’t come back on until 3:30 PM Friday so there was no time to write before getting back to the arena for another game. Apologies for that.