NBA PLAYOFFS : They’re Back to Business : Clippers: About an hour away from the Sports Arena, they will face Jazz again.

A team originally from New Orleans and a team that came to Los Angeles via Buffalo and San Diego play today in a substitute arena that last housed pro basketball during the days of the American Basketball Assn.

It is another chapter in what has become a series for the ages--if only because it seems to have taken that long to complete.

The Anaheim Convention Center, about an hour away from the Sports Arena, becomes the home-court advantage pro tem for the Clippers, who again try to avoid elimination in the first-round matchup against the Utah Jazz. Tip-off is 3 p.m. for a Game 4 that was originally scheduled for Thursday in Los Angeles, was pushed back to Saturday and then, despite the desires of the league office, to Sunday in Orange County after other options were considered.

Both teams will come with their bags packed. The Jazz, in Marina del Rey since Monday and shuttling between the hotel and practices at Inglewood High and Loyola Marymount but otherwise remaining sequestered, will return to Utah after the game no matter what. The Clippers have a separate charter standing by in hopes of a fifth and deciding game Monday night in Salt Lake City.

Clipper management could face headaches by playing here after selling some 11,000 tickets for Game 4 and then having to move it to a 7,400-seat arena because of unrest in Los Angeles. But they will gladly take that, and a possible financial bath, to keep the game as close to home as possible and retain as much fan support. They even bucked the league, which wanted a Saturday afternoon game to accommodate TV, because word about the switch might not have reached enough people.

The Clippers would have played in somebody’s back yard before going back to the Delta Center earlier than necessary. So they picked Anaheim, shipped the Sports Arena floor down and hope for the same magic in Disneyland’s neighborhood as they had in beating the Midwest Division champions in Game 3.

But that was way back on Tuesday, in another county and, emotionally, another time. Before riots altered their frame of mind and the delay took away much of their momentum.

“It’s like starting a new series almost, because we broke up the pace,” Clipper Charles Smith said Saturday. “We’re going to have to pick it back up, and they’re going to have to pick it back up.

“Once we put the uniform back on, it should be like going back into our own realm because we’ve been doing it for years. But driving down, we all may be thinking about what’s going on.”

So how sharp can the Clippers expect to be?

“As sharp as they (the Jazz) are,” Doc Rivers said. “Both of us may have lost something. You can say the momentum has swung back to zero and this is Game 1. But let’s hope we don’t have a Game 1 again.”

That was a 115-97 victory for the Jazz, followed by another victory at the Delta Center for a 2-0 series lead before the Clippers won Game 3 at the Sports Arena.

Since then, the Clippers had a bad practice Friday, perhaps because of the uncertainty of the day and site for Game 4, but they were much sharper Saturday. Injuries have also healed, at least partially, Smith’s strained lower back, Ron Harper’s bruised right knee and the sprained left ankle of Utah’s Jeff Malone.

Clipper Notes

The only NBA game played at Anaheim Convention Center was an exhibition between the Clippers and Lakers in 1979. . . . Clipper assistant coach Mack Calvin, a teen-ager living in Watts during the 1965 riots, got a lot of reminders during a drive to the Sports Arena Thursday morning. “I saw burning buildings, people running in and out of a store across the street from the Coliseum,” said Calvin, whose family moved to Long Beach in 1966. “I had no fear. Because I’m black there was no anger directed at me. I had fear for other people who are not black.”