Clippers Don’t Have a Shot, 92-70

Rookie point guard Keyon Dooling sat in front of his locker eating fruit and did his best to sum up the Clippers’ recent problems.

“I can’t really tell you what it is,” Dooling said after the Clippers’ 92-70 loss to San Antonio Wednesday night. “We’re working hard in practice. We’re trying in games. We play well for a while and then we go through a drought where we won’t score.”

With a huge ice bag on his left knee and a tired look on his face, Lamar Odom also gave his opinion about his team’s woes.

“Our attitude is still good but we’re going through that slump we knew would come,” Odom said, referring to a nine-game skid that has seen the Clippers fall to 13-33. “We’re not staying in games like we used to. We’re just not shooting the ball well.”

Given his chance to break down the Clippers’ play, Coach Alvin Gentry was a little more severe.

“It’s not so much what we are doing defensively,” Gentry said. “We’re hurting ourselves because we can never get on any kind of roll scoring baskets. It’s not really our shot selection. We’re just missing very makable shots. Because of that, it puts pressure on us on defensively to come up with every stop possible just to stay in the game.”

Get the point? The Clippers can’t shoot, and when that happens in the NBA you can’t expect to win too many games.

In losing to the Spurs for the 12th consecutive time, before an Alamodome crowd of 13,738, the Clippers scored three more points than they did in their record-setting 96-67 loss to the Spurs on Monday. But that’s not saying a lot.

The Clippers missed 55 of 86 shots, including eight of nine three-point shots. They managed to score only 16 points in the first quarter, 18 in the second and 16 again in the third. The game was basically over after that.

“The best thing is to have players who are self-motivated and really have a goal in mind and are committed to that,” said San Antonio Coach Gregg Popovich, whose starters each scored at least 12 points. “That works better than anything. There are no tricks or plays you can run to make people motivated.”

Motivation for the Spurs at this point of the season is easy. They rode Tim Duncan’s 22 points and 16 rebounds to their fifth victory in a row, and even though they played without several key injured players, it’s clear they are getting ready to make a strong run for their second NBA title in three years.

For the Clippers, who had only one player score more than eight points Wednesday, their motivation is survival.

Their once-promising season has suddenly turned sour and Gentry knows the scrutiny will intensify if the Clippers don’t start winning again soon.

“We’ve competed and played pretty good basketball, but the most disappointing thing is that we’ve lost so many close games,” Gentry said. “I thought we would lose some at the start of the season and then get better until we started to be able to win those games. But we have not been able to do that.

“We could easily have at least seven or eight more wins. If we had 20 wins right now, everyone would say we are right where we need to be in order to take the next step.”

But the Clippers aren’t, which frustrates Gentry.

“You always second-guess yourself as a coach . . . that’s not unusual,” he said. “You try and put your team in position to win games down the stretch. And, in order to win games like that, you have to be able to execute plays at the end and step to the line and make free throws. We’ve struggled a little bit with that. But that is not anything you wouldn’t expect having to play with so many young guys.”

In many ways, the young players the Clippers have look even more inexperienced now than they did at the start of the season.

Darius Miles, Quentin Richardson, Corey Maggette, Dooling and Odom, the five players on the roster who are 21 or younger, combined to miss 26 of 41 shots.