The Los Angeles Clippers are about to be pushed to the point of desperation. They lost Bradley Beal to a season-ending hip injury, and with John Collins struggling, they look like such a major loser coming out of the Norman Powell trade. Kawhi Leonard is currently on the mend with multiple injuries, and James Harden and Ivica Zubac simply have not been able to do enough to keep LA afloat. Making matters worse, they were on the receiving end of a 55-point outburst from Nikola Jokic in a 130-116 loss for the Clippers against the Denver Nuggets.

Head coach Tyronn Lue is scraping the bottom of his roster in search of answers on how to put an end to the Clippers' rut. In fact, Lue tried everything — going deep into his bench, playing the young guys — to try and steal a game from the surging Nuggets. The game plan for LA was apparently to let Jokic get his and stop the other Nuggets from popping off.

Little did Lue know that this game plan would end up biting the Clippers on the backside.

“Our gameplan was to make him score and just take away his passing, take everybody else outside the game. I thought [in] the first half, we did a good job with that,” Lue said in his postgame presser, vis Oh No He Didn't on X (formerly Twitter). “I didn't think he would score 55.”

The Nuggets have a hard counter for Clippers' Ivica Zubac

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Gary A. Vasquez-Imagn Images

Not a lot of centers in today's NBA can slow down Jokic in the paint. Zubac is the rare player who can hang with him on the interior. But on the perimeter, that's a different story.

The Nuggets know how to counter Zubac, and they do so by letting Jokic roam the perimeter more often and have him launch threes. His shot was on point on Wednesday, and all the Clippers head coach could do was tip his cap.

“He plays like a guard when Zu is on him. Pindowns, and all that stuff, which is tough for Zu to try and navigate through. When you go small on him, you just post up. It's just a tough cover. But I don't think he would get 55.”