Doc Rivers isn’t sweating over Clippers’ 0-3 preseason start

Doc Rivers wanted to make something clear about his team.

“I have one announcement: We’re probably not going to win the preseason championship,” the Clippers coach said Tuesday, less than 24 hours after his team fell to 0-3 nearly halfway through its exhibition schedule.

The Clippers have been atrocious on defense, allowing nearly 111 points per game, and have been outrebounded by each of their opponents.

None of it seemed to bother Rivers, who is striving to find combinations that will help his team in games that count. He’s started different players at small forward in each game and rested star players in fourth quarters.

“You want to try stuff and put your guys in different spots,” Rivers said. “Some of it I’ve liked, some of it I have not liked at all. But that’s fine. I don’t think we’ve played great so far. There’s no magic potion to it. You just start playing better eventually.”

Rivers said he did not notice the streamers that fell from the rafters after the Utah Jazz’s 102-89 victory over the Clippers on Monday night at EnergySolutions Arena in Salt Lake City.

Informed that the Jazz (3-0) was in contention for that mythical preseason title, Rivers cracked a smile.

“There you go,” he said. “They’re going to win it.”

Time saver

Rivers said he was in favor of the NBA’s experiment to play a 44-minute preseason game Sunday between the Boston Celtics and Brooklyn Nets.

“I think it would help the players,” Rivers said of shaving four minutes off a standard game. “I think it would make the game a little bit better, as well. I think the fourth quarters would be more urgent earlier because of the shorter game. But we don’t know, we just think all this stuff, so we’ll have to wait and see.”

Rivers, who is a member of the league’s competition committee, said he was pleased with Commissioner Adam Silver’s willingness to try new things. If games were shortened to 44 minutes, players would play 328 fewer minutes over the course of a season, roughly the equivalent of seven fewer games.

Etc.

Reserve center Ekpe Udoh, who has not played the last two games after spraining his right ankle in warmups, is expected to be available when the Clippers play host to Utah on Friday night at Staples Center in their next exhibition game, Rivers said. . . . The Clippers did not practice Tuesday but attended a dinner for the team’s charity golf event at Trump National Golf Course in Rancho Palos Verdes.