Clippers have guards down in loss to Pacers
Clippers forward Blake Griffin loses the ball out of bounds as he is fouled on an attempt to drive to the basket.
It felt as if the Clippers were missing a lot more than their regular starting backcourt.
Shooting guard J.J. Redick sprained his right ankle 17 seconds into the game Wednesday night at Staples Center, joining injured point guard Chris Paul as unavailable.
Blake Griffin, DeAndre Jordan and Jamal Crawford were still active participants, though they hardly resembled themselves for most of the Clippers’ 103-91 loss to the Indiana Pacers.
Griffin struggled to shoot from both the field and the free-throw line, Jordan scored all of two points and Crawford’s season-long funk deepened as the Clippers’ three-game winning streak came to a dreary end.
Inaccuracy was a theme for Clippers not named Lance Stephenson, who scored 19 points while making eight of 11 shots against his former team. The rest of his teammates combined to make 22 of 68 shots, a dreadful 32.4%.
“I don’t think we were off rhythm,” Stephenson said. “We were playing together, we had good looks, we just didn’t make some of the looks that we had.”
Griffin’s frustration was visible in the third quarter when he missed a free throw and slapped the ball back toward a referee. He missed the next one too. He finished with 19 points, making six of 18 shots and seven of 14 free throws, uncharacteristic of his massive strides in both categories in recent years.
“I swear you’re human and you have games like that and it leaks over to your entire game,” Clippers Coach Doc Rivers said of Griffin’s problems at the free-throw line, “but it happens.”
There was another oddity for Griffin: He didn’t pick up his first rebound until there was five minutes five seconds left in the fourth quarter and finished the game with three.
He also had six assists and four turnovers.
“I think it was a little deeper than makes and misses,” Griffin said. “We have to be better in a lot of areas. You can’t really expect us to win a game when I play that poorly, shoot that badly, turnovers.”
Jordan had 15 rebounds but missed all four of his shots and six of eight free throws. Crawford made five of 16 shots and one of eight three-pointers, representative of a season in which he was shooting 35.9% overall and 27.3% from three-point range entering the game.
The Clippers did make a push in the fourth quarter, slicing what had been a 16-point deficit to five with three minutes left before their decision to intentionally foul Ian Mahinmi resulted in the Pacers center making four of six free throws. Ballgame.
Rivers blamed the lack of ball movement mostly on himself.
“I thought what we were running was very stagnant and so I have to do a better job,” Rivers said.
Paul George finished with 31 points on nine-for-23 shooting for the Pacers, whose four-day stay in Los Angeles that started with a victory over the Lakers also came with a happy ending. It didn’t seem to matter who the Clippers used to defend George, as he made jumpers over Luc Mbah a Moute, Jordan and Griffin.
Redick rolled his right ankle on the Clippers’ first possession of the game while landing on a jumper. He was fouled on the play and limped to the free-throw line to make both attempts before jogging to the locker room with trainer Jasen Powell as Crawford checked into the game.
Redick tested his ankle by taking some jumpers at halftime but did not return. Paul sat out with inflamed rib cartilage he sustained Monday against Portland.
The Clippers they left behind were mostly no-shows in a different sense.
“We just had no movement,” Rivers said. “It was a slow-paced game in a lot of ways with two fast teams. It was strange.”
ben.bolch@latimes.com
Twitter: @latbbolch
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