Clippers Add Another Lowlight : Pro basketball: Fitch sees no positives as team is buried under three-point avalanche. Heat romps, 126-83.

Glen Rice, even after thinking hard, could name only four players on the Clippers.

It didn’t matter that he couldn’t identify them all. What mattered was that he badly embarrassed them all, with a 35-point performance in the Heat’s 126-83 rout at Miami Arena.

Rice was 13 for 20 from the field--including four of nine three-point attempts--and led the Heat to the most decisive victory in franchise history. When he recorded his 30th point, on a jumper early in the third quarter, he was only eight points behind the entire Clipper team.

“I just kept moving, using my screens,” Rice said after the Heat set a season high by shooting 60.8% from the field. “I made up my mind all I need coming off a screen is half a second, and they gave me that half a second. It wasn’t that they were playing bad defense. I was just kind of feeling it.”

Rice was being kind. The Clippers (4-24) were playing no-contact, no-muscle defense. Miami’s front line outscored its counterparts, 61-28, with Kevin Willis chipping in 19 points and 14 rebounds and Matt Geiger grabbing eight rebounds and scoring seven points. The Clippers’ high-scoring honors, such as they were, went to Harold Ellis, who had 11 points. That’s the lowest team-leading total in a season of lows.

And that doesn’t even begin to address Heat forward Brad Lohaus’ three-point spree coming off the bench. Lohaus, who had been averaging 4.8 points per game, made his first six three-point shots, inspiring chants of “Looo-haus” from the crowd of 14,626 before he finally missed. He finished with 18 points; the Heat finished with a franchise-record seven three-pointers in the fourth quarter and tied a season-best with 14 overall.

Said Clipper Coach Bill Fitch: “Lohaus is Larry Bird’s son’s godfather. I think tonight, he thought he was Bird.”

It wasn’t the Clippers’ worst game statistically--they lost to Portland by 48 points on Dec. 14--but it was bottom-of-the-barrel stylistically, especially since it followed Tuesday’s upset of the Bulls in Chicago.

Fitch found it fitting that the only prop available to lean on after the game was a plastic trash can.

“We let them manhandle us in the low box, (Ledell) Eackles and Willis, and we never got into it at either end of the floor,” Fitch said after his team’s sixth loss in seven games and eighth in 10 games. “This is the first time I can’t find one good quarter.”

The Clippers had no defense for their effort. Eric Piatkowski, cheered by fellow Nebraskans in town for Sunday’s Orange Bowl game, felt compelled to apologize to his fans. “All those people show up and I never dreamed we’d play this bad,” he said. “I want to tell them I’m sorry.”

Clipper Notes

Guard Randy Woods, who was kicked in the groin and experienced hemorrhaging, did not accompany the team to Orlando. He was to be evaluated today and might be sent home.