INGLEWOOD — The Clippers need help, possibly even divine intervention.
Asked what the team has to do if they hope to avoid more late-game misfortunes, guard Kris Dunn didn’t point fingers at his teammates. Instead, he pointed to the sky and said, “Trust God.”
Despite their lofty petitions, Coach Tyronn Lue seems to have run out of answers. The Clippers continue to commit untimely blunders, which have led to them dropping eight of their past nine games and 10 of their past 12.
“The guys are doing all the right things to get to that point (to win games) and putting the work every day to be playing better but not get the results you want as far as wins, that’s tough,” Lue said, adding that his message to the team on Tuesday centered on staying the course.
“It’s going to change, but we got to do stuff better,” he said.
The Clippers (6-19) will be looking to play better in their third meeting on Monday at Intuit Dome against the Memphis Grizzlies, who have beaten them twice in the past three weeks. In each of those games, the Clippers watched their strong first-half play dissolve in a series of mistakes and missed opportunities.
In their first meeting, the Clippers squandered a double-digit first-half lead and lost 112-107. In their second game on Dec. 5, the Clippers went cold in the fourth quarter and lost 107-98.
The Clippers are going to need more than one defensive stop or rebound against the Grizzlies, who will have guard Ja Morant back in the lineup. Morant missed 10 games with a calf injury before returning to the lineup Saturday in a loss to the Utah Jazz.
“Honestly, just everybody got to make one more play,” Dunn said. “I think if everybody makes one more play late in the stretch of the game, we’ll come out with more wins than losses.”
Many of their recent losses have been a result of missing or giving up key rebounds, a bad foul, an opponent’s big shot and a do-or-lose shot by the Clippers.
As an example, down by two with 11 seconds remaining against the Houston Rockets last Thursday, Kawhi Leonard committed an offensive foul that gave the Rockets the ball. Then, with 8.7 left on the clock and a chance to tie the game with a 3-pointer, Nicholas Batum stepped on the inbound line searching for a teammate to pass to as no Clippers came back, leading to a two-point loss.
“(We just need to) take one game at a time, see if we get some games, some wins under our belts,” Leonard said. “I mean, that’s all you could do at this point and accept the challenge. And the challenge is to try to get a win and consistently win and that’s what we got to do.”
Lue said he believes the Clippers are within one key play of turning around the season. Miss a few more and they won’t have a prayer of seeing 30 victories this season.
“Just trying to figure out ways, just staying positive with the group because we’re losing games, but we can’t have a loser’s mentality,” Lue said. “So, my job is to make sure we’re uplifted every day, make sure we have great energy. The guys are putting in the work so there’s no loss there.
“We just got to continue to stay with the program and understand we got to make those tough plays in the last three minutes of the game. We gotta make those tough plays. And the last thing is that defensively in that fourth quarter, we gave up a lot of transition points (17.7ppg) and a lot of offensive rebounds (28.5%), so we got to be better with that.”