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After a jarring start to the season for the Los Angeles Clippers where they experienced turmoil with poor play and the trade for star James Harden, they have been exceptional ever since. This was further proven Saturday night when they beat the Boston Celtics in their own arena, 115-96, to bring them to a five-game winning streak.
Clippers head coach Ty Lue said to the media after the game that they remembered how the Celtics won the last time they faced off when they were at the Crypto.com Arena. Lue said that this game is a “measuring stick” to compare Los Angeles to another great teams like Boston who carried the best record in the NBA according to Ohm Youngmisuk of ESPN.
“The guys were pretty motivated,” Lue said. “… When they came to L.A., they did us pretty bad. So guys were locked in. This was a game [where] PG, we thought he might be out, but he wanted to play to see where we're at. Just a measuring stick against a great team. We just wanted to kind of see where we're at. We had that on our mind.”
Kawhi Leonard, Jrue Holiday on Clippers-Celtics game
Star Kawhi Leonard led the way with 26 points and seven rebounds in the win to Boston and said he was “happy” to hand them a loss on their own floor. However, despite being just over halfway through the season, Leonard admitted that nothing really matters unless they perform like this in the postseason.
“I'm happy that we were able to come in and give the Celtics a loss,” Leonard said. “But it really doesn't mean nothing until you get to the playoffs and you're doing the things we did tonight — executing, making shots, playing good defense. It's good that we had carryover from last night coming from Toronto and winning these back-to-back games. But you got to just keep getting better as the year goes on.”
On the Celtics side, they had a bad shooting night compared to their lights out performance against the Miami Heat last Thursday as this time around, they shot 36 percent from the field and 25 percent from three-point range. Boston guard Jrue Holiday said it was a “old-fashioned a**-whooping” according to Darren Hartwell.
“A good old-fashioned ass-whooping,” Holiday said in his postgame interview. “They did everything better. Rebounding, transition, 50-50 balls — it seemed like they were a step ahead. Definitely humbling, I think, to be able to kind of come home and get your butt kicked.”
Joe Mazzulla on the Celtics' “poor offense”
Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla spoke after the game to the media and said the key flaw was their down night on offense impacted the way they played defense. He cited that the Clippers capitalized on transition, having 20 points in that area, and just played better in multiple aspects.
“I thought tonight was one of our first games where our poor offense affected our defense,” Mazzulla said to NBC Sports Boston's Abby Chin. “We gave up 20 points in transition in the first half on a combination of live-ball turnovers, not getting 50-50 balls, and then either missing a shot and not crashing at the proper angle, or not finishing at the rim.”
At the end of the day, Mazzulla seems to admit that the Clippers played harder than Boston did, but the shots were just not falling for them like they have done for the whole season. On the bright side for them, they are still three games ahead as the No. 1 team in the Eastern Conference.
“I thought they did a good job of messing up the timing of every one of our passes with their active hands,” Mazzulla said. “So what looked like a guy open, we missed it by a half-second because of their activity and their active hands, and it kinda messed up the timing and rhythm of our offense, especially when we got into the paint. But we just missed shots, and I thought they played well.”
The Clippers win in eye-opening fashion and improve their record to 30-14 which puts them third in the Western Conference as they are on the aforementioned five-game winning streak. They will look for six straight as their next challenge will be Monday night against the Cleveland Cavaliers.