Clippers lose with the Kings without their king and Kawhi Leonard sister King found out
earlier today Kawhi Leonard would be out tonight due to right knee soreness that surgically
repaired right knee hopefully nothing serious. Welcome back into Clippers talk. I'm out
of Maslin. This is the Patriot Am eleven fifty after the Clippers fall one
O nine to ninety five up in sack Town. Join the show right now?
Is big Will Updyke from Clips and dip Will. How are you feeling
after this one? The type of loss the Clippers just suffered in a road
trip where they went three to one, but you wanted to get the sweep
and get greedy. Here I understand this one. This one still doesn't sit
right with me. Look, I said that a loss against the Kings would
undo any good will they they'd made up for with the last couple of games.
Loo Kimore locked in the Queen change is a little bit mores KWHI.
But I still gotta say, like some of what I'm seeing from the rest
of the Big three that's not Kawhi Leonard. I just have serious questions about
their lettle like their their competitive level and how much pride they're actually taking in
this because this was three quarters of a game and the garbage time squad ended
up getting this in, you know, making this a closer game than it
was when the starters were pulled in the four. Yeah, it was over
by the end of the third, it was yeah cooked. They lost that
third quarter thirty five to nineteen. Thought they had some really bad turnovers and
then the guys turning it over not getting back on defense has been bugging me.
Russ has been guilty of that. Norman Powell was on one of those.
James Harden had five turnovers. It's felt like when things unraveled, it
looked like Russ was trying to play at a pace that the rest of the
team wasn't ready for that third quarter, you could say, so some of
those things are like a little bit more forgivable to me. Like, obviously,
if you're out of piece's biggest Kawhi, you know, Russ is still
returning into the lineup, and I look, I have my qualms about sort
of how his tempo actually fits in with the rest of the roster, depending
on the lineup that he's in. Like some of that stuff is a little
bit understandable, but like the effort on the boards I thought was absolutely pathetic,
you know, like the it's just I would expect Paul George and James
Harden to do a lot more knowing that Kawhi is going to be out,
Like, you can't just coast. You can't just coast as though Kawhi is
still there winn he's not. And you know, maybe this isn't a must
win game in their eyes, even though I think with the way the standings
are looking, they should try to win every game that they can to get
one. That's all we're even talking about right now, to get one round
of the playoffs with home court advantage. Let's at least try to lock up
four. Can we do that? Can we just do that? And from
what I saw today from like Paul George, who started very very well this
game, I liked a lot of what I saw from Paul George in the
first half and then kind of took the foot off the gas and James Harden
just that was a stinker. Yeah, And had they won this game,
they would have been up, not technically but because they have the tiebreaker four
games on the Dallas Mavericks with seven remaining, that might have done it,
That might have secured at least home court in the first round, which I
think, Yes, we just had a caller talk about this too. They
lost their last five home games. I don't care. You don't not want
home court advantage in the playoffs because in March they lost some games badly at
home, when before that they were a really good home team. Now they're
twenty five, and yeah, if it comes to seven games, I'm so
sorry like that, you just can't make an argument for me that it's not
better to be on your home court. I don't care what your regular season
record was. We know, I mean, we've talked enough about what this
team's issue was. Like they sent their foot off the gas coming out the
All Star Break. They didn't take it seriously enough. I don't think that's
necessarily a reflection or there's no cause is not like causation is not cause,
or correlation is not causation. Sorry, with the Clippers in the home game
stuff, if it comes to a seven game series, there's just I'm sorry.
I can't find I can't think of a fan that doesn't want that on
their home court. Yeah, if there's anything that I'm going to say throw
out when you talk about what translates to the playoffs and what doesn't, I'm
going to say, even if you had a better road record, I still
want home court advantage in a playoff series. That's just acidine. But I
look back at that the Math series, that first round series, nobody won
a game at home until Game seven. But guess who who who on whose
home court Game seven was? It was the Clippers. Yeah, that's a
great point. You know, we talked about it yesterday on the pod with
Chuck Mockler, but he brought up your biggest concern, what's our biggest concern
at this point of the season, And I think we both were in lockstep
that the play of James Harden over the last month is the biggest concern.
Because I've said it before, but if we're giving him, I think the
majority of the credit for that twenty six and five run, and just how
unstoppable they looked when everything was clicking. When things are looking like this,
where they're thirteen and thirteen their last twenty six games since the Grammy road trip,
we got to look back his way and say, uh, is something
wrong with the system here, the machine is something going on. How do
you feel about that? Well, uh, I agree one hundred percent,
and like, look, I hope that this is just a little bit of
coasting to stay fully healthy or get to where he needs to be in the
playoffs. But man, given his given his playoff record already, you gotta
have concerns. The guy getting up seven shots with no Kawhi Leonards, you
gotta have some concerns. He made one, he made one, three no
other shot from the floor. To five turnovers to eight assists not good.
I just I don't get it because I feel like I feel like there's this
pervasive attitude where everybody has been there before, but really only one guy on
this roster. I mean, okay, one guy as a starter on this
roster has really been there before, not to discredit, not to discredit anybody
else. And I just don't see it. I think like it made sense
to me at the beginning, the slow start. He hadn't played a game
with Philadelphia, he had not played an NBA game prior to coming here.
Of course he was gonna have to get into shape. But the way he's
look coming out of the break, it's just a little incomprehensible, and it
is definitely worrisome. You hope, I mean, I hate that I'm relying
on this, but you hope that it's to flip the switch thing, right,
Like you hope that he's going to be able to gear it, to
get it back into high gear and sort of lock those things in as we
get towards the end of the season. But I from right now, it
doesn't look great. I'll say that it's almost like a false sense of security.
We'll just we'll flip that switch when we get there. You've mentioned it
before, but at times it has looked like a team that felt like maybe
we had done enough, we proved who we can be when we're running on
all cylinders, and therefore, now just fast forward to the playoffs and we'll
be that team that was twenty six and five of our thirty one game stretch
for a couple of months. Yeah, I'm not seeing it right now.
And stuff like, I mean, like I can understand like some of the
poor shooting things. I can understand things, but like getting scored by sixteen
points in the pain, getting outscored by sixteen points on second chance point,
getting out rebounded fifty six to thirty eight, Like these are things that they
could slow down, Like it's not just it's not just any one thing.
And we shot forty one percent from three as a team and like still couldn't
put this one away, Like it's just there's a lot of effort things that
feel like they're not coming together. And I think, look, I obviously
a lot of a lot of iyre, a lot of a lot of blame
has to go on the big stars. That's that's what they get paid for,
that's what they're there for. But I do think that it's as we
get closer and closer to the postseason that it is concerning looking at some of
these rotations that we have and how ineffective they've been. Tyce look like a
bonehead to night. I don't know what was going on there, but I
like, I just I have some concerns about about the playable rotations in an
actual playoff series. And I just feel like we're getting to the point where
it's like maybe seven to eight guys, and if the rotation is that short
and you get a game out of Paul George and or Harden, that's gonna
be like that's just gonna be a tough road to ho I don't know how
else to put it. You mentioned Daniel Tice there, and I wonder how
much of that was rust. He played eighteen minutes, but it was the
first time he had played in I think ten days, which is interesting.
Some guys look like they were playing really hard out there. I felt like
if Easa Zubats was trying to make up for everybody else's mistakes, but he's
going up against the Bonis and there's an individual battle going on there where you
know, he's got a tough of an assignment where he can't do everything like
sorry, that's not gonna happen. He had eleven boards and four offensive rebounds,
and I felt like was playing really hard. He didn't shoot the ball
that well. I at least like the fact they gave him fourteen shots,
but there were other guys to get him going too. Yeah, they waited
too long. Probably they waited too long, and then you're down. You
know, you go from being down four with eight minutes left in the third
quarter to a couple minutes later being down fifty teen, as we have seen
too many times because of all the turnovers and live ball turnovers and giving the
other team, You know, too many opportunities. When you give a team
sixteen more shots than you the likelihood that you're going to win that game on
the road against a good team, a quality team still in the Sacramento Kings
with their two main stars, it just makes things so much tougher. I
just did it looked like they were trying to play the Kings game, trying
to play too fast. That was one issue for me, Will But then
also I don't know if it was mental fatigue over the road trip, but
they just looked like they lost focus. They absolutely looked like they lost focus.
I mean those turnovers were those those turnovers were really ugly looking. And
yeah, I don't know. I guess I do think that they have all
season long had an issue of maintaining their identity in game and not like not
playing another team's game. I feel like it's kind of rare that we see
the Clippers sort of impose their sort of tempo and their sort of style of
play on another team. And I think that that was one thing that they
were more effective at doing during that win streak, you know, leading up
into the Grammy road trip before the break, and I just haven't seen that
same level like even in these wins and where process has looked a lot better,
the defense has looked a lot better. The rebounding from Kawhi and Paul
George has looked so much better. I just don't feel like I've seen the
same level of being able to impose both like their tempo and style of play
on a game. And that is kind of troubling because you're not going to
be another team playing their game. Seven games we're up against it here,
Will, I didn't mean to cut you off, but to me, oh
go for that point kind of speaks to lacking that identity. What are you
trying to force teams to play? What is your style of play? Like
you're forcing them to adjust to you, but what's your style of play?
I don't It's been a little bit of a moving target. Big Will update
has been with us tough defensive team that is bottom three defensively over the last
two months. Will, thanks for doing this tonight a little clips and doubled
it absolutely. Thanks for having me. Let's go Clip