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Clippers will try to stop Thunder’s Russell Westbrook, somehow

Point guard Chris Paul and the Clippers will have their hands full Monday trying to slow down Thunder point guard Russell Westbrook (0).
(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)
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Twice last week, Clippers Coach Doc Rivers was glued to his television to watch what is becoming the artistic masterpiece of work by Oklahoma City’s Russell Westbrook.

Rivers viewed what the entire NBA has witnessed this season.

“Westbrook is like a force of nature,” Rivers said.

On Monday night, during a national televised game on TNT that’s a part of its Martin Luther King Jr. Day coverage, Rivers and the Clippers will be presented with the supreme challenge of trying to slow down Westbrook.

“You can’t invest all your time trying to stop him, because you’re not anyway,” Rivers said Saturday afternoon. “And you have to try to slow him down. But you’ve got to try to not allow all the others that he gets involved to play well.”

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It has been a season in which Westbrook has mostly demolished the league, his force of nature putting the 6-foot-3 point guard on pace to be in the NBA history books.

He’s averaging a triple-double, placing Westbrook in position of joining Oscar Robertson (1961-62) as the only players in league history to achieve that feat.

Westbrook had 19 triple-doubles before the Thunder played at Sacramento on Sunday night.

He was averaging a league-best 30.8 points per game, 10.5 assists (second in the NBA) and 10.7 rebounds (11th).

Besides those numbers, Westbrook is perhaps the most difficult player in the NBA to game-plan for because he’s always on the attack and always pushing the pedal from anywhere on the court at any moment.

“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,” Rivers, his eyes wide now, said glowingly about Westbrook. “You know he’s coming at you. I mean, that’s the one thing.”

Clippers winning games

Winning games is all the Clippers have done since the calendar turned to 2017.

They have won six consecutive games, doing all they can to move past the six consecutive games they lost to end 2016.

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“We’re just trying to pile up wins, seriously,” Chris Paul said. “I don’t even know what place we are in the West right now.”

Well, the Clippers are the fourth-seeded team in the Western Conference, holding a two-game lead over the fifth-seeded Utah Jazz.

“But we know we’ve got to keep piling up wins,” Paul said after the Clippers defeated the Lakers on Saturday afternoon to keep their winning streak forward moving. “So, for us, I think that’s our singular focus, just to keep winning games, winning games.”

Etc.

Clippers forward Wesley Johnson just had his third kid, son Robert, who was born Saturday. Wesley played in the game against the Lakers earlier that day, had his car pulled up to Staples Center during the affair and immediately left for the hospital after the Clippers defeated the Lakers. Johnson also has twins, son Wesley II and daughter Santana.

UP NEXT

VS. OKLAHOMA CITY

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When: 7:30 p.m., Monday.

Where: Staples Center.

On the air: TV: TNT; Radio: 570, 1330.

Records: Clippers 28-14; Thunder 24-17.

Records vs. Thunder: Clippers 1-2.

Update: The Clippers are averaging 108.0 points per game, seventh-best in the NBA, and allowing 102.2 points per game, seventh-best in the league. That has allowed the Clippers to be one of four teams in the league to be in the top 10 in both offensive (108.9, sixth) and defensive (103.0, sixth) efficiency.

broderick.turner@latimes.com

@BA_Turner

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