Clippers Learning to Keep Their Cool in Heated Western Conference Race
LOS ANGELES — If you've seen one Los Angeles Clippers game, you've seen them all.
A whistle blows, but the call goes against them. Or the whistle doesn't blow, and the Clippers complain about the silence.
Some players chat with the officials. Others yell in their general direction. Still more throw their hands up in disgust. Doc Rivers gets so incensed that it looks as though his eyes are about to pop out of his head as he berates the referee.
"We talk to the refs way too much, myself included," DeAndre Jordan admitted after the Clippers' 99-92 win over the Charlotte Hornets on Tuesday. "We get emotional. I think it’s because everybody cares."
That emotional overzealousness was on full display during Sunday's narrow loss to the Houston Rockets at home, which featured one particularly animated break in the action for L.A., as ESPN.com's J.A. Adande noted:
Scenes like this aren't unique to these Clippers, but they do seem to play out more often for them than for most other NBA teams.
"I think we need to try to keep getting better [about interacting with referees]," Rivers said prior to Tuesday's game. "That was one of my goals that I haven’t succeeded in when I first got here. I think we were better last year. There’s games where we’re bad, and there’s games where we’re better at it. I do think overall we need to be better at it."
The Clippers were better in that regard against Charlotte. The players kept their frustrations under wraps and steered clear of confrontation with the referees, even while their 22-point lead dwindled down to one in the fourth quarter.
"I call them emotional hijacks," Rivers said afterward. "We didn’t have any tonight, for the most part. Our guys stayed in the game. That doesn’t mean they didn’t have intensity or whatever, but they kept their focus on basketball instead of the peripheral stuff that really doesn’t have an impact on the game."
"They might go unnoticed sometimes, but those emotional hijacks or whatever you want to call them are huge," said Blake Griffin. "When we avoid those, especially with the refs—and I’m as guilty as anyone, if not more so than anybody. I need to do a better job. That was kind of a focus tonight, just not even worry about it."
That comes as a step in the right direction for L.A. Coming into Tuesday's action, the Clippers led the league with 79 technical fouls. That's eight more than the Oklahoma City Thunder, who racked up an NBA-high 99 techs in 2013-14, and one of last season's total of 80 T's.
Then again, the Clippers were even more prone to giving up needless freebies prior to Rivers' arrival in the summer of 2013. In 2011-12, Chris Paul's first in L.A., they notched 88 techs in just 66 games. During Vinny Del Negro's last go-round on the sidelines in 2012-13, they were the only team to top triple digits in techs.
To be sure, Rivers has seen worse. During the first four years of the Boston Celtics' most recent Big Three era, his squad averaged 108.25 technical fouls.
Boston was replete with repeat offenders back then. Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce had their fair share of emotional outbursts, but even they paled in comparison to the likes of Kendrick Perkins and Rasheed Wallace, who drew 16 and 17 techs, respectively, during the 2009-10 season.
"I coached Rasheed Wallace. When he went, I didn’t even move," Rivers recalled. "What am I going to do besides get in trouble?"
Apparently, Rivers did something to cool his players' jets. Over his last two campaigns in Beantown, Rivers' C's racked up a total of 131 technical fouls. Wallace's retirement and Perkins' trade to Oklahoma City may have had something to do with that, as the Thunder didn't start climbing the tech charts until Perkins' second full season in OKC.
Perkins could've joined the Clippers as a bought-out free agent this season—not that L.A. needed another guy with a penchant for jawing at the refs. Rivers already has a roster replete with repeat offenders. In fact, three Clippers rank among the NBA's 12 most T'd-up this season, with Chris Paul (five techs), Jamal Crawford (five techs) and J.J. Redick (four techs) also registering on the leaderboard.
| Russell Westbrook | 14 |
| Markieff Morris | 13 |
| Matt Barnes | 12 |
| DeMarcus Cousins | 11 |
| Draymond Green | 11 |
| Blake Griffin | 11 |
| Tyson Chandler | 10 |
| Marcus Morris | 8 |
| P.J. Tucker | 8 |
| Rudy Gay | 8 |
| Kevin Garnett | 8 |
| Gerald Henderson | 8 |
| DeAndre Jordan | 7 |
"We’re a strange team. You’re not going to change people," Rivers remarked. "If you’re an emotional person, you’re an emotional person...but we have so many of them on one team that it’s something that we have to get better at it."
That's a tall order for any coach, even one as successful and highly respected by his players as Rivers is. The difficulty of the challenge just makes it more crucial to the Clippers' prospects of going deep in this year's playoffs.
The hothouse of the postseason—with its brutally tough competition out West, familiarity-bred contempt, cornucopia of crunch-time situations and abundance of high-stakes pressure—can be and often is a dangerous place for teams that lean toward hot-headedness, as the Clippers do.
Fail to keep your cool and you're liable to lose focus and yield crucial points, be they the result of poor execution or the opponent's free trips to the foul line. On the other hand, keep it together under pressure and you're more likely to come out on top.
"It keeps us focused on the game, not worried about the refs," said Chris Paul, when asked what effect keeping calm around the officials can have on the team. "We just played. We played through it tonight, and we’ve got to keep working on that going towards the playoffs."
The Clippers don't need any help with sending their opponents to the free-throw line. According to NBA.com, L.A.'s opponent free-throw rate (0.315 per field-goal attempt) is tied with the Denver Nuggets for the second-highest in the league. That's to be expected when your team is one of the 10 most foul-prone, as the Clippers are, per Team Rankings.
L.A.'s no stranger to the stripe, either. According to NBA.com, the Clippers' own free-throw rate (0.300 per field-goal attempt) is the league's fifth-highest.
Their starting frontcourt is among the best in the game at getting to the line, with Griffin and Jordan combining for 12 freebies a night. Those two draw a ton of contact, which is to be expected with players who are as big, athletic and unstoppable within spitting distance of the rim as they are.
And, in Jordan's case, when they're as ripe for hacking as he is.
Poor free-throw shooting, like emotional volatility, isn't something that switches overnight. It usually takes years to change, and the Clippers don't have that kind of time at their disposal right now. If they want to contend for a title this spring, they'll have to figure out how to keep their emotions in check, lest they allow their higher pursuits to succumb to their more base instincts.
Added Griffin: "Things are out of our control, so hopefully we build on that going into the playoffs."
Josh Martin covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter.
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