Clippers look doomed to destruct, then rally past Mavericks to save their season DALLAS — The arena

DALLAS — The arena was roaring, the Clippers’ margin for error crumbling, an offseason of uncertainty rapidly approaching.
Trailing 2-0 in this first-round playoff series with the Dallas Mavericks, a position few higher seeds have ever recovered from, the Clippers arrived in north Texas well aware of the danger that awaited in Game 3 — and the stakes riding on avoiding it.

Assessing the existential crisis the championship-chasing franchise could plunge into should this postseason end even earlier than last, one league source described the matchup before tipoff as simply “the must-win of all must-wins.”

But before they could win Friday, in a 118-108 victory that ensures a Game 5 in Los Angeles, they had to simply survive.

Mavericks star Luka Doncic toyed with Clippers center Ivica Zubac off of screens, making three straight baskets. His teammates continued their nearly unfathomable three-point shooting. Within eight minutes, Dallas led by 19 and 17,705 fans inside American Airlines Center — their largest crowd in 14 months, watching the first home playoff game in five years — reached decibel levels surpassed only when the arena’s jumbotron showed franchise icon Dirk Nowitzki.

Clippers coach Tyronn Lue had predicted one day earlier that this game would reveal his mercurial roster’s mettle, and as their moments of truth arrived inside a raucous, crucible atmosphere, the Clippers answered with a victory that “says a lot about us,” Lue said.

Lue wanted to see fight. Down 15 in the first quarter, he called a timeout.

“It was like, listen, let’s just stick with the game plan,” Lue said. “Luka made some shots early like he always does and now we have to be ready to weather the storm and keep attacking the offensive end, and like I said, I give our guys credit because they did that.”

They finished the quarter on a 20-4 run. When literally pushed around, they charged back. Reserve Terance Mann chased after Mavericks center Willie Cauley-Stein after being shoved in the neck on a rebound in the third quarter, a play that earned Cauley-Stein a technical and kept the Clippers on edge.

Lue wanted to see leadership. Kawhi Leonard scored 36 points and Paul George 29 behind metronomic consistency on offense, drilling shot after shot to counter the step-back jumpers by Doncic that gave him 44 points and made the crowd, at times, delirious. Lue called his top scorers “phenomenal.”

“We got down 0-2, and they weren’t discouraged,” he said. “Their conversations to the players, the things we have to do to get better and be better, they led that.”

In late-game moments in which the Clippers had folded in the first two games, they used a small-ball lineup — and its pick-and-rolls, in particular, involving Rajon Rondo — to pick apart the Mavericks and outscore them 21-14 over the final 7:18.

The win was earned Friday, but the comeback’s spark was lit during the painful previous 48 hours.

“There’s been a lot of conversation, ever since we lost Game 2, even Game 1, there’s been a lot of dialogue after the games and in the locker room trying to figure out how to be better,” said Rondo, who had six points and eight assists. “Once we got on the plane yesterday, talked about the game, going over the scouting reports in more detail.

“So it’s been a nonstop thing, constantly on my mind personally and the team, as well — understanding what we have at stake here, the type of talent we have and how we can overcome this 0-2 deficit.”

Said George: “We just felt like we weren’t playing our game to begin with to be down 0-2. We just felt we weren’t playing our style. I thought tonight we got to that. This is where we hang our hat on, playing on the defensive side.”

Whether the Clippers can take back control of this series hinges on replicating Friday’s ability to withstand the punches as the Mavericks made 20 three-pointers and grabbed 13 offensive rebounds.

Yet the Clippers emerged with a victory that removes some weight off their shoulders — at least, for 48 hours — by containing, at last, the Mavericks not named Luka. Jalen Brunson was held to 14 points, Tim Hardaway Jr. to 12 and Kristaps Porzingis just nine on three-for-10 shooting.

That defense held Dallas to three points in the final 3:48 of the third quarter, but the offensive outage was offset by the Clippers’ own.

By mustering only three points in the quarter’s last 4:07, and then scoring just five points in the first four minutes of the fourth quarter, the Clippers lost a rare opportunity to separate themselves, increasing a three-point lead to only five.

This was what the virtually full house had arrived to see: Doncic burnishing his playoff credentials with a comeback to send the higher seeds into a miserable 3-0 hole.

But the third option the Clippers needed so badly to emerge finally did when forward Marcus Morris made all three of his three-pointers in the fourth quarter. He finished with 15 points before fouling out, and after his last three, he traded words with the Mavericks’ bench.

The Mavericks, like the crowd, looked angry. But they had no retort, as the building finally fell quiet.

“We’ve yet to show anything,” George said. “We’re down 2-1. We’re not the favorites, we’re not the defending champs. We haven’t showed anything. We’ve got to continue doing it.”

Andrew Greif is the Clippers beat writer for the Los Angeles Times. He joined The Times after covering college football and sports enterprise at the Oregonian. A University of Oregon graduate, he grew up on the Oregon coast.

   MORE FROM THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

1 Column: Clippers show resolve, resilience when pushed to playoff abyss
2 NBA’s mercurial Morris twins now have an L.A. story. They’d love a Hollywood ending
3 NBA’s mercurial Morris twins now have an L.A. story. They’d love a Hollywood ending
4 Serge Ibaka might not play for Clippers in Game 3 because of back spasms

Clippers' small-ball lineup turns Mavericks into one-dimensional team
Down 19 early in Game 3, Tyronn Lue made an adjustment that shut down Kristaps Porzingis and eventually slowed down Luka Doncic.

Perhaps LA Clippers coach Tyronn Lue knew what to do all along.

Maybe that’s why Lue and the Clippers expressed little to no concern regarding the team’s 0-2 deficit going into Friday’s 118-108 victory over the Dallas Mavericks in Game 3 of the first round of this Western Conference playoff series.

“We took the punch,” Clippers forward Paul George said in his ESPN postgame interview.

Then, LA delivered a Game 3 haymaker in fighting back from an early 19-point deficit to snap a five-game postseason losing streak.

Through the first two games and some of the first half of Game 3, Mavericks star Luka Doncic successfully hunted Clippers big man Ivica Zubac on switches. Lue combated that by turning to a small-ball lineup that eventually helped the Clippers clamp down on Doncic, who still managed to pour in a playoff career-high 44 points, while their own stars Kawhi Leonard and Paul George combined for 65 points on 24-of-35 shooting.

The subtle adjustment helped LA to settle in defensively, as the Clippers also shut down Kristaps Porzingis, who finished 3-of-10 for 9 points.

Whether the Clippers changed the trajectory of this best-of-seven series remains to be seen. But we’ll soon know Sunday when the teams meet again for Game 4 in Dallas.

After falling behind 0-2 to the Mavericks on Tuesday, George said the team convened, talked things out and came away from those conversations with a renewed level of trust in one another.

“We finally figured out how we want to attack,” Lue said.

The Clippers did that by going hard at the Mavericks in the paint, outscoring them 46-24 in that area.

Defensively, LA simplified coverages going into Game 3, and Lue wasted little time subbing out Zubac with Nic Batum to assist in cooling off a red-hot Doncic, who scored Dallas’ first 8 points to start the game. When Doncic drilled a 25-foot stepback just 2:13 into the game, Lue called for timeout and inserted Batum for Zubac.

The move put Batum and Leonard on Dallas’ bigs, making any Mavericks’ pick-and-roll a switch the Clippers could effectively navigate.

Sure, Doncic scored 11 points in the first three minutes of the game as Dallas built a 30-11 lead on Jalen Brunson’s floater with 4:38 left in the first frame. But from there, LA kept chopping into the Mavericks’ lead, and embarked on a 17-2 run to trail by just 3 points at the end of the first quarter.

In the last 25 years, Friday’s game marked just the fourth postseason victory for the Clippers after trailing by 19 points or more.

Doncic would finish the first half with 26 points, but by intermission the Clippers had taken a 32-27 lead.

In the process, LA turned Dallas into a one-dimensional team that relied too heavily on Doncic due to the ineffectiveness of the Mavs supporting cast, while the Clippers leaned on their own stars in Leonard and George. Leonard produced a team-high 36 points on 13-of-17 from the floor and 3-of-5 from deep with two blocks and a steal, while George added 29 points on 11-of-18 shooting.

According to Elias Sports Bureau, Leonard became just the second player to put up 35 points on 68% shooting in consecutive playoff games in the shot-clock era, joining LaMarcus Aldridge, who accomplished that feat in 2016 as Leonard’s teammate with the San Antonio Spurs.

With LA slowing down Doncic, the Mavericks supporting cast of Porzingis, Dorian Finney-Smith, and Tim Hardaway Jr. combined to shoot 10-of-34, while Maxi Kleber finished as the team’s second-leading scorer (14 points).

Down the stretch, the Clippers also used veteran guard Rajon Rondo to pester Doncic, who scored 10 of Dallas’ 22 points in the fourth quarter. Doncic said he struggled through an issue with his neck in the second half that also affected his left arm.

So, that’s something to watch with Doncic in Game 4, and you can also expect the Clippers to use Rondo more to defend him.

As for Porzingis, who averaged 17 points coming into Game 3, he admitted the output was “below what I can do.” Hardaway averaged 24.5 points through the first two games on 63% from the field and 64.7% from 3-point range, only to end Game 3 with 12 points on 4-of-14 from the floor.

Michael C. Wright is a senior writer for NBA.com. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on Twitter.

The views on this page do not necessarily reflect the views of the NBA, its clubs or Turner Broadcasting.

Related
Tatum outduels Nets' stars with iconic performance
The city of Boston was treated to the kind of performance executed only by the franchise's best legends.

Hawks max out advantages vs. Knicks in Game 3
After