Wary Clippers have to deal with being a big favorite against Portland Trail Blazers

The Clippers lingered in their locker room Wednesday night inside Talking Stick Resort Arena to watch the final minutes of Kobe Bryant’s career, emitting cheers so loud they could be heard down a hallway.

Once Bryant was finished defying time in a 60-point farewell, a different sort of retro theme played out on the big-screen television: footage of the Clippers’ most recent game against the Portland Trail Blazers.

As Clippers forward Jeff Green pulled on sweatpants and a jacket, he glanced at the screen and contemplated an opponent that exceeded expectations during the regular season but will be a consensus underdog when the teams open their first-round playoff series Sunday night at Staples Center.

“They’re a strong team,” Green said. “We’ve got to be prepared, we have to go in focused, we can’t take them lightly.”

It will be the first time the Clippers will be heavily favored to win a playoff series in the era of Chris Paul and Blake Griffin. Most prognosticators picked the Trail Blazers to finish near the bottom of the Western Conference after losing every starter besides Damian Lillard from last season’s team, but they surged into fifth place behind their dynamic young backcourt.

The Clippers won the regular-season series between the teams, 3-1, though that ledger doesn’t come close to conveying the drama. There was a brouhaha involving a player inadvertently left off the active list (Portland’s C.J. McCollum) and a game-winning buzzer-beater sunk by one of the NBA’s best shooters (the Clippers’ J.J. Redick).

Clippers Coach Doc Rivers and Portland counterpart Terry Stotts also got into it on the sidelines … during a preseason game.

Portland must decisively win the battle of the backcourts to have a chance of replicating its first-round upset of the Houston Rockets in 2014. Nearly every other matchup, particularly Griffin versus Noah Vonleh and DeAndre Jordan versus Mason Plumlee, can be counted heavily in the Clippers’ favor, even with Griffin still rounding into form after an absence of more than three months.

Lillard has struggled in his career against the Clippers, who have continually trapped him amid a variety of coverages. Lillard’s average of 16.2 points per game against the Clippers in his career is more than five points below his overall average.

“I’ve guarded him a lot, so just being physical with him” has been effective, Clippers guard Austin Rivers said. “But, the thing is, none of that matters anymore. It’s a new series so we’re going to take that with a grain of salt and just move forward. They go as he goes. If he doesn’t play well, they don’t win.”

McCollum will presumably be active and might be agitated. The controversy about whether Doc Rivers could have overridden the Trail Blazers’ leaving McCollum off their active list during a game in January should have never started because it was a nonissue; Rivers had no input on the matter.

But reports from the Portland media suggested otherwise and McCollum even dragged Austin Rivers into the fray.

“It’s unfortunate that that’s how it had to go down,” McCollum told reporters, “but if it was my son, I would probably protect him, too.”

Austin Rivers dismissed the notion McCollum could come into the series with an edge because of a 3-month-old gripe.

“I don’t give a — what he thinks, quite frankly, whether he’s pissed off, it doesn’t affect me, Chris, J.J. or anybody,” Rivers said. “He’s a good player. I think he’s going to be ready to go because it’s the playoffs and so are we.”

The Clippers can only hope the series is as lopsided as the discrepancy in playoff experience. The Clippers’ roster has a combined 568 games of playoff experience. The Trail Blazers? Ninety-two.

“Paul’s had 400 of those,” Doc Rivers said, referring to veteran forward Paul Pierce, the most valuable player of the 2008 Finals with Boston, “so it’s a little slanted.”

Rivers was only slightly exaggerating. Pierce has appeared in 158 career playoff games, nearly double Portland’s current roster in the postseason.

The numbers are almost as one-sided when it comes to playoff experience in games played with their current teams. The Clippers dominate that category as well, 204-41, with most of their top players having faced the pressure of the playoffs in multiple rounds.

“I’ve already been through all that,” Austin Rivers said of the playoffs, “so this is a new year and I’m 10 times better than last year and so is our team.”

Follow Ben Bolch on Twitter: @latbbolch