Poor Play, Not Loss, Disappoints Coach

It started with a 14-point loss at Houston and ended with a blowout defeat at San Antonio, but the Clippers’ three-game swing through Texas wasn’t a total Lone Star letdown.

In between, they outgunned the Dallas Mavericks.

“If you told me we were going to come on this trip and we were going to get one win, I’d say OK,” Coach Mike Dunleavy said late Tuesday night at San Antonio, after a 111-90 loss to the Spurs. “I’d take it because these three teams are really tough teams; 0-3 would have been heartbreaking, but it’s a possibility when you’re playing these three teams. They’re much more talented teams than we are.”

Still, Dunleavy was disappointed that the Clippers weren’t more competitive against the Spurs, who took advantage of a season-high 25 turnovers by the Clippers and made 56% of their shots, a season high by a Clipper opponent.

“I expected a better performance,” he said. “That’s where it hurts me. Of course, we want to win every single game, but I’m more interested in making teams that are more talented do the things we want to make them do to beat us.

“If that’s the case, they just use their talent. But tonight that wasn’t the case. Tonight we played so poorly that we made it easy for them.”

The Clippers are 11-13. They’ve lost seven of their last eight road games and are 3-9 outside Staples Center. That’s the bad news. The good news: They’ll play 13 of their next 16 in their home arena, one a Laker home game.

From now to Jan. 24, when they begin a stretch of 14 of 16 on the road, they’ll leave town only for a three-game trip in early January.

Still, Dunleavy said he doesn’t look at this next month as a make-or-break stretch in the Clippers’ bid to reach the playoffs.

“I don’t fear the road,” he said, aware that the Clippers’ fate probably will be decided in the season’s second half, when they’ll play a majority of their games in unfamiliar surroundings. “I look at it like, I’ve got just as good a chance of winning on the road as I do of losing on the road....

“It’s a mind-set. When you come in talking like you’re worried about the road, it puts a negative thought in somebody’s head. I don’t worry about the road.”

For most of the next four weeks, he’ll have no need.

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Count the Clippers’ backup point guard, Doug Overton, among those disappointed that NBA scoring leader Allen Iverson is not expected to play Friday night when the Philadelphia 76ers open a West Coast trip against the Clippers.

“You want to play against the best players,” Overton said. “At least, I like to. You want to see guys healthy and playing; that’s what the NBA’s all about. At the same time, if he’s not playing, we’ve got to knock them down.”