Clippers fall to Hawks as losing streak grows to 6 games – Press Enterprise

LOS ANGELES — It’s been Coach Tyronn Lue’s mantra for weeks now. Play defense. Develop a defensive mindset. Create good habits starting with defense. He said the Clippers can score, but their downfall has been a breakdown in their defense.

It was something he again referred to before the team faced the Atlanta Hawks on Sunday. Lue said they had to avoid falling behind by double digits.

“Don’t get down 15, 16 and then fight back,” Lue said, “because then you’ve exhausted so much energy that now you can’t finish the game. “So, we just have to have that (defensive) mindset and try to do it for 48 minutes.”

His words of warning lasted 16 minutes before the Clippers were staring at a 10-point deficit.

“To me, you have to go get it. You have to play harder to go get after it. You can’t wait for luck,” Lue said. “For me, just playing 48 minutes hard and giving it all you got on both sides of the floor and that’s what we have to do.”

The Clippers, however, didn’t get the victory, losing to the Atlanta Hawks 112-108 Sunday in the first game of a five-game homestand. The loss extended their losing streak to six games.

“You know it’s a tough stretch, that happens,” Nicolas Batum said. “We got to stick together. I mean, it’s not pretty, it’s not easy right now, but we can. We can’t separate ourselves, so we’ve got to stick together, stick together as tight as a team.

“We’re going to get back to it. It’s not, it’s not easy right now. It’s not pretty, that’s for sure. But we can’t just relax. We showed some good things. We just had to finish it. That’s it.”

Lue was hoping that with a lineup change, some defensive work and perhaps a bit of luck, the Clippers could have snapped their losing streak.

The coach said that the Clippers tend to defend well in spurts and Sunday’s game was no different. They squandered a 17-point lead, trailed by as many as 11 in the third and led by 11 in the fourth before it ended in a four-point loss.

With the Clippers up, 106-102, Dejounte Murray scored a layup followed by a pair of free throws and a jump shot by Trae Young to give the Hawks a 108-106 lead. Kawhi Leonard responded with driving layup that tied the game.

Young drove the lane to put the Hawks up by two. The Clippers missed two long-range shots before Young made two more free throws to seal the game. He finished with a game-high 30 points.

Kawhi Leonard led the Clippers with 29 points, Ivica Zubac had 17 points and 18 rebounds, while three others scored in double figures. But it wasn’t enough.

With 41 games left, Lue decided a midseason change was needed and started Terance Mann at guard over Reggie Jackson, a move that gave the team an initial burst of energy. The Clippers, behind Mann’s quickness, led by as many as eight in the opening quarter, giving the team reason to hope for a different outcome.

Mann lined up alongside Leonard, Batum, Zubac and Marcus Morris Sr. Paul George did not play because of a lingering hamstring injury and Luke Kennard also was out.

With the Clippers’ second unit on the floor, though, the Hawks, led by Young and Murray, slowly chipped away at the Clippers’ lead to take a 66-52 lead at the half. Atlanta took advantage of the Clippers’ lack of 3-point shooting without George or Kennard and outscored the Clippers, 41-26, in the second quarter that started with a 13-0 run.

The Hawks scored four points in the last 8.4 seconds off John Collins’ alley-oop dunk and an ensuing inbounds steal by De’Andre Hunter for the final points of the half.

It was the kind of scenario Lue had hoped to avoid.