GAME #34: LAC (21-12) @ PELS (21-14) FRI 1/5—5 PM

[wakelaunch1]

Hate the way the deep bench plays together

[nickhx2]

Plumlee! Nice!

Looks like Mann's 3PT is trying to climb back to the mean.

1/2
2/4
2/3

it absolutely boggled my mind that mann was even a topic of conversation in regards to his "slump" lol

[MartinToVaught]

Best part of this game: only 13 points and one three from Valanciunas. That guy has been such a bonafide Clipper killer over the years, I'm stunned when he doesn't look like prime Dirk against us.

[nickhx2]

well, one of our demons down

i'm sure more to go, somewhere, out there

and playing like this, fall, they will

[LamarWho]

well, one of our demons down

i'm sure more to go, somewhere, out there

and playing like this, fall, they will

OKC. Can't we til we play that team again.

[clipperlover]

Nice win. Always nice when Kawhi can sit late in the 4th. Means the team is clicking. If Russ does nothing but bring that defensive energy every time out, he is a major contributor. Anything else is gravy. He can just go all out for the minutes he is on the court.

Hope we don't have a let down game on Sunday. Hope they can get up for inferior competition.

[clipperlover]

well, one of our demons down

i'm sure more to go, somewhere, out there

and playing like this, fall, they will

OKC. Can't we til we play that team again.

Kings realizing that don't have what it takes to compete trying to go get Siakam. With Clips and Nuggets showing their superiority in the West, expect teams to start making some bold moves. If OKC is looking to part with some of those picks to bolster their roster, then they aren't serious about competing for a title this year.

[KingCrimzzon]

Awesome win! This is the kind of whooping this team can bring to their bad match up? League better watch out! I don't even feel like we've peaked yet! Love the direction we are heading, just stay healthy FFS!

[jengmann3]

Great win. Russ and Norm completely changed the game in the first quarter. PG was pretty great too. I know ppl always say this but it really does look effortless at times for him. This was a great T Mann game. Tough back to back coming up.

[KingCrimzzon]

Two daily doubles (LAC W, LAL L) in a row! A third will be tough LAL is going to be super desperate next game. The good news is they played big minutes for Lebron and AD and our guys got the 4th quarter off today. Hope the strong D shows up and the refs aren't trying to bailout LAL. A third loss at home in a row for LAL may raise alarms to defcon 3 around here .

[Dynamix]

[esqtvd]

so, win or lose, this is the kind of effort that makes you feel really good about the potential of the team.

i'm gonna make a bit of a contradictory statement in that it's not so much about russ as a sole player (despite the fact that he's everywhere and doing everything right now, and clearly doing the most out of all), but moreso that it feels like the team is getting involved in basically every single thing going on. deflections, blocks, i mean whatever it is, the team is making it their the pel's business their own business on the defensive end. everything contested in some way, shape, or form and no gimmes. and that's what i look forward to when it comes to what may come from this team as it grows together on D.

What a difference when your best player doesn't half-ass his way through the regular season.

You can get a pretty good seed with a guy like this on your team.

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[esqtvd]

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[Kelphus]

This is championship level performance.

Was great to see Plumlee get some time on the court.

Defense was so strong it was truly a joy to watch.

Zion is a beast but he wasn't much of a factor, played I think less than 20.

[playaloc916]

Harden with 13 assists and 1 turnover. It's crazy how effortless he makes it look. A lot of his passes don't look like anything special, yet none of the previous point guards were able to do anything nearly as effective. Seems like he's embracing the floor general role, letting Kawhi and PG focus on scoring. Bench has been good with Norm and Russ leading the charge.

A lot of things are clicking and Lue's rotations are working. Effort in closing out games have been good. Looks like the latest "System" patch has been installed and things are running smoothly now

[nickhx2]

Harden with 13 assists and 1 turnover. It's crazy how effortless he makes it look. A lot of his passes don't look like anything special, yet none of the previous point guards were able to do anything nearly as effective. Seems like he's embracing the floor general role, letting Kawhi and PG focus on scoring. Bench has been good with Norm and Russ leading the charge.

A lot of things are clicking and Lue's rotations are working. Effort in closing out games have been good. Looks like the latest "System" patch has been installed and things are running smoothly now

it's actually quite remarkable considering we got to watch at least a few years of an in-his-prime cp3 himself, and despite being paired with blake griffin and deandre jordan (of all the guys), the clippers with harden et. al somehow look and feel MORE effortless with his otherworldly passes. also maybe cause cp3 never really liked trying that stuff anyway lol.

Agree with the rest. Been thinking for a little bit on a few things, Given last night's win and i gotta say

- I'm pretty sure we have never had a team that has been this good. But it's not just a talent thing, it's a "everything sits in the right place" thing. The parts all fit, and there's no alarming weaknesses anywhere.

- It should really tell us (and perhaps the league?) a lot that this team clobbered one of its 2 or 3 biggest, baddest, long-time bullies. Pretty much going into the season i'd have said my biggest concerns were dealing with some combination of denver/nola, and the rest was whatever. Well, now we've seen that we can beat them and that means a lot in many ways. It's one thing to feel like you're fated to lose to your kryptonite teams, and that's awful. It's the opposite thing to flip the script and prove to yourself that you've got the juice to do it, because it gives you the confidence and knowledge that you can do it again, and now we have that. Like, throughout the cp3 era i kinda quietly thought it was always gonna be a wash, because no combination of whatever we did was ever gonna help us take down the almighty warriors - years of squandered resources and mis-managed teams by doc rivers being the main factor.

But over the last month or so i keep coming back to this weird feeling that i can't get over and i keep going "wait a second, are we the warriors now? lol" - like in the sense that we're almost indomitable or inevitable, and there's just nothing most teams can do about it. Like it really truly came about for me against the heat where i kinda felt bad for them cause they just were powerless against their fate. Same-ish for new orleans last night even though we've had issues with them. Also, not the same for the suns cause **** that team.

- In concert with all that, last night's win should also subtly say something about how strong this team is right now and how much better it can be. PG had a good, albeit season average-ish night for him stats-wise. But he practically ended the game by himself quite early by canning a bunch of 3's and that was that. And when PG is doing that while the rest have played supporting cast, i think it should tell us that this team can do some really remarkable things in heightened scenarios where we need all the guys to come online.

- Supporting cast: really hard to say enough about westbrook's contributions last night. Saw some comment on GB saying something like "lOOk hOw GooD tHe tEAM is WhEN RuSs cAME oUT oF tHe gAMe" lol. Like, bro, the dude completely snuffed out any contributions the pels bench woulda had and allowed the team to bridge maximal defensive impact from the starting lineup, to the bench, back to the starters, and he, along-side PG, put the pels to an early demise.

I mentioned it before but for whatever insane reasons exist, people still keep talking about terence mann (ex. saw a comment on GB from a 76ers fan being critical of the team for holding up the harden deal over him, among other mentions of him). Like, WHY lol. He's almost literally perfect for what the team wants to do. People who are caught up in his shooting or scoring miss the entire point of why the team wanted to keep him to begin with: it's because he gets to do a bunch of gluey/short-roll/POA defense/get-after it stuff that brings the starters all together, and his shooting %'s are literally irrelevant.

WRT powell: i loved him pretty much the moment he stepped onto the court for us, but really felt like he lost a good amount of luster last year because he was just not doing enough for us on defense, and mostly came into this season with the same-ish biases. Really easy for me to think, ok well he's a vacuum scorer who doesn't defend well, plays in his own system, we have bones, we need help elsewhere, let's trade him, makes sense, right? Well now I don't wanna do that at ALL. He's not perfect but he's perfect for us. His defense has picked up, and his scoring in necessary junctures just always seems so reliable and timely.

- I don't think lue gets enough mention or credit with how things have developed, btw. Yeah things looked kinda dicey and there were plenty of concerns with lineups and all that but i mean look. PJ tucker got completely phased out, kobe brown began to gave us effective minutes, amir coffey showed up for one game and instead of treating him like dumpster-trash (like the way he did with robert covington after amazing games), he immediately swapped him into the rotation - and while all that was going on, he very quietly separated harden and westbrook's bulk minutes, AND THEN even more quietly started putting them together for small minutes at a time to help them build synergy. And if you look at the resulting product, they're actually functional together with a decent amount of chemistry when it looked like complete disaster before. All this stuff happening all at once says a lot about his vision of the team but maybe more importantly for us as fans, that we CAN trust him - a thing I'd lost with him over the past couple years.

So i guess for me the question i keep coming back to is: now what? Like seriously, how does this team get better? Well, just playing more games together for one thing. Can this team turn into that truly special unit on defense the way that peak warriors did? Maybe. Harden's been much better than anticipated for us on that end. Zu's turned into a god damn force, and neither PG nor kawhi have washed out yet due to age so we have many things going for us. But getting to that level of comfort requires more time together, so in that regard all we can do is be patient.

Do we want to make any trades? I mean if you ask me, i'd say no because i wouldn't want to mess up the current chemistry of the team, though i'd also say i don't know precisely what the team is lacking just quite yet.

I guess i'm just saying, for the first time in a long time, too (maybe ever?), the team has everything it needs. So i think we can be content to sit back and watch, and go from there.

[Clemenza]

We slaying all of our demons this season! This was the game I wanted, hell we all wanted this win. Just dominate on both ends of the floor. A reeling Lakers team tomorrow. Lets crush them into oblivion