Clippers conundrum: Pick up the pace while limiting turnovers
Some things rarely change with the Clippers.
In a league where teams turn over their roster almost annually, the Clippers boast nearly unrivaled continuity. Seven players remain from Tyronn Lue’s first season as coach four seasons ago, 13 players with guaranteed contracts are back from last season, and the coaching staff has remained virtually intact each of the last two offseasons.
Yet during the last week, as the team opened training camp, players shuffled in front of reporters and stated something new so often, it became a running theme: The Clippers intend to run.
“It’s not how it was before,” forward Robert Covington said.
That would be an understatement. These are the same Clippers whose average possession last season lasted 14.7 seconds, 10th-slowest in the NBA. Off opponents’ made shots, only four teams took longer per possession than the Clippers. They ranked 15th, right at the league average, in the frequency of their transition opportunities last season, and in the last three seasons under Lue, the Clippers have never ranked higher than 19th in points scored per transition possession.
With an offense built around Kawhi Leonard‘s and Paul George’s offensive talent in the half-court setting, the Clippers have been aging, reluctant to run and only so-so at turning pace into points when they do.
Yet with point guard Russell Westbrook acting as pace-setter with the starters, and Bones Hyland filling the same role with reserves, and after an offseason that addressed lacking athleticism with the additions of lob threat KJ Martin, an excellent cutter, the Clippers claim that is all changing.
Even if the Clippers do not exactly resemble uptempo Sacramento, they do not want to revert to their plodding past.
“Just having the mind-set to consistently run every single time,” Lue said. “We’ve been a slow team over the course of the last three or four years, and just not really being high and pushing the pace until Russ got here at the end of the season last year,” Lue said.
The Clippers opened training camp in Hawaii with Kawhi Leonard and Paul George healthy for first time since 2020 and they’re getting back to basics.
Early reviews have been mixed as Lue has spent the first days of practice ahead of Sunday’s preseason opener against Utah going over the mechanics of a successful fastbreak — a player running deep into each corner to provide the ballhandler room to attack, a big man running to the “dunker spot” near the baseline opposite the ballhandler, to act as a spacer or outlet.
“It takes a while for everybody to get in that mind-set of understanding every possession we wanna run the floor, we want to attack, we want to get easy baskets,” he said.
Westbrook is the key. The Clippers averaged 14.3 seconds per possession with Westbrook on the court but 14.9 seconds when he sat, and the more than half-second difference was the largest gap for any Clipper who played more than 200 minutes. Other contributors who made the pace significantly faster while on the court: Covington, Norman Powell and Hyland, per data from pbpstats.com.
“We slowed down the game a lot [last season], but that wasn’t necessarily something that hurt us,” Covington said. “It’s just, we have an athletic team and we got to use it.”
Lue remarked on opportunities the team didn’t take advantage of last season, saying the team’s analytics showed they were near the bottom 10 teams in advance passes but second in scoring efficiency on them. Yet running faster could clash with one of the team’s other top priorities of limiting their often copious turnovers, including Westbrook and George.
As Paul George and the Clippers continue talks regarding a new extension, the desire to retire as a Clipper remains the same for him.
The Clippers were 12-3 last season when Leonard and George both played and the Clippers finished with more possessions than their opponent, Lue said. Points of emphasis during the opening practices were what George called “the Achilles’ heel stuff that plagued us last year — taking care of the ball, getting out on the break and being better defensively.”
All of the running during early practices was partly for conditioning, forward Nicolas Batum acknowledged, and partly for Lue to set a tone of all-business urgency. Yet it served a dual purpose.
“We want to play that way too, we want to play faster,” Batum said. “No, we didn’t play fast last year, so we want to push the pace. You know, Russ is pretty good at it, so we’re going to have to follow Russ and have to be in shape and keep running, Bones is the same.”
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