Slumping Los Angeles Clippers Have Many Complaints, Few Answers

PLAYA VISTA, Calif. — Marreese Speights ambled into the Clippers' training facility, decked out in sweatpants and a self-referential "I Got 5 On It" shirt, looking every bit the happy-go-lucky guy that NBA teams and fans have come to know and love. But the man who stepped in front of the microphones and recorders before practice Thursday sounded little like Mo Buckets.

Nor did he the night before, when Speights shared his frustration in the locker room following the Clippers' 115-98 blowout loss to the Golden State Warriors, the team with whom he'd spent the last three seasons.

"First, we need to start really just leaving the refs alone," Speights said at the time. "Guys just got to sacrifice, do some other things than scoring, do some other things than your personal goals. Just try something new. They've been doing it here for four or five years and it hasn't been working, so it's time to try something new."

Like Ron Burgundy jumping into the bear pit, Speights seemed to regret his decision to speak his mind the way he did.

"You just want to win," he said at practice the next morning. "You just want to do it the right way, want to do it for a great coach like Doc [Rivers] and the city of L.A. That's something that maybe I should've said a little different, but I'm not calling nobody out by it."

Still, there were hard truths in what he said, even if some didn't necessarily agree with his comments the day after.

Head coach Doc Rivers, for one, dismissed Speights' concerns about the Clippers' hounding the officials as "being frustrated after the game. It was an easy target in the conversation."

But Rivers, Chris Paul and Blake Griffin all drew technical fouls against the Warriors for arguing with the referees. According to Sporting Charts, those upped L.A.'s team total to 20 techs—sixth-most in the league and one behind Golden State.

That actually counts as an improvement for this group, which topped the Association in technical fouls four times during Paul's first five seasons in L.A.

"We've just got to play and understand that they're human and they're going to make mistakes," J.J. Redick said of the referees. "I don't think anything they're doing is personal or anything like that. I don't think we have it worse than any other team. They're the best refs in the world. We've just got to stay off of them."

The box score bore out Speights' warnings about selfishness, to a degree. The Clippers notched just 15 assists on 36 makes against the Warriors—19, if you're generous enough to include their three secondary assists and one free-throw assist, per NBA.com.

Despite making a concerted effort to improve their ball movement during the preseason and carrying that work into the start of the 2016-17 campaign, L.A. has since slipped to the middle of the pack (or worse) in just about every category related to sharing.

	Stat	Rank
Assists/Game	22.0	17th
Assist Percentage	56.9	14th
Secondary Assists/Game	5.3	15th
Free Throw Assists/Game	2.3	10th
Potential Assists/Game	41.8	24th
Points Created by Assist/Game	53.0	13th
Passes Made/Game	306.1	13th
Assist-to-Pass Percentage	7.2	15th

Rivers, though, didn't see L.A.'s offensive stagnation against Golden State as an indication of more deep-seated issues within the team.

"I don't think we have an agenda team. I think we have proven that," he said. "But last night, the ball didn't move. So that's a player [saying] like, 'Move the ball.' I tell Mo that all the time too. 'Move the ball.'"

Rivers, instead, explained the stickiness of the Clippers offense as a function of guys' trying too hard to be heroes on their own.

"We came to the game with good intentions," he said. "Sometimes, you want to beat a team so bad that you can't beat the team. That's what I saw. I thought we put so much pressure on ourselves to win that game that we were in the way of ourselves."

L.A.'s reasons for wanting to win that badly were abundant.

The team came into its game Wednesday having lost four of its previous six overall and six in a row against Golden State—not including the 45-point preseason blowout at Oracle Arena. The latest meeting, while only the 23rd of 82 dates on the Clippers schedule, was this club's first real chance to measure itself against the Western Conference titan through which all roads to the NBA Finals are bound to pass.

"We've still got to be as good as them, and we're not," Rivers said, "but we're better than that."

Andrew D. Bernstein/Getty Images

How, then, do the Clippers get back to being the powerhouse they were through the first three weeks of the season, rather than the inconsistent squad they've been over the past two?

"We've got to play with some joy," Redick said. "Basketball is meant to be fun. We're serious. We've got to be prepared. We've got to follow the game plan and all that. I just think that we're better when we play with joy.

"It shouldn't be a burden to play great teams. It should be fun to compete against teams like the Warriors."

Speights could be one to infuse some spirit into a group that seems to have lost it. He has brought and can bring a fresh inflection to cut through the occasionally stale air surrounding a Clippers core that's been together for more than three years now.

"I think it's always good to hear voices," Rivers said, "but just because you hear voices from the outside doesn't mean they're right. They've got to learn the inside too."

Speights is feeling his way through it, just as these Clippers—with six new faces on the roster this season—are still searching for themselves.

"We're going through a transition to become a different team, to be pioneers of the NBA," he said. "We understand we're going to get a lot of teams' best and really just stop overthinking a little bit."

"Two weeks ago, s--t, man, we were rolling," Redick said. "Hopefully we'll get back to it."

All stats accurate as of games played on Dec. 7, 2016. All quotes obtained firsthand.

Josh Martin covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.