Steph Curry drops 50, Clippers prevail

LOS ANGELES (News4usonline) – The matchup between the Los Angeles Clippers and Golden State Warriors seemed like an NBA playoff preview. Both teams are jockeying for a better seed position as the regular season winds down in a few weeks.

 The Clippers are holding on to the No. 5 seed, while the Warriors, the league’s reigning champs, are pulling up on Los Angeles at the No. 6 position. 

So, in a mid-March game played at Crypto.com Arena in downtown Los Angeles, the two teams locked horns in a real meaningful game. Well, they all are at this point in the season. Nevertheless, from the opening tip, the buzz around the game felt electric.

That theme played all the way through until the Clippers finally managed to turn back the Warriors with a 134-126 win in front of a sellout crowd. 

“I mean tonight they made runs,” Clippers forward Kawhi Leonard said after the game.   “Golden State’s going to make big runs. Great players, great mindsets on the floor. When they come down [Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson], coming down, knocking those big shots, threes, two or three in a row, like you said, we kept our composure. We stayed steady.

Leonard continued, “We came down and executed on the offensive end and made shots. We were able to go on a run ourselves. It’s kind of like that throughout the game, but we did a great job at staying at it in that fourth quarter even when they were in the bonus pretty early. We kept fighting, we got in the bonus. We made big plays.”

For the Clippers to earn their 37^th win of the season, Los Angeles had to weather the storm that is better known as Steph Curry. Generally recognized as the best shooter in the history of the league, unleashed another Curry-like performance before what appeared to be a pro-Warriors crowd.

Curry went through a myriad of magical shot attempts and came up with 50 points against the Clippers. He made three-pointers. He drove to the basket. There was playground stuff thrown in the mix. For a pretty good night’s worth of work, Curry made 20 of his 28 field goal attempts as he kept the Warriors in the game with his mini-runs throughout the contest.

“I think especially when I guy like that explodes, to keep your composure and keep staying with the game plan I thought we kind of tried to take them out of what they were doing and Steph [Stephen Curry] just made a borough of shots,” Clippers head coach Tyronn Lue said during his postgame comments. “We try to blitz, we try to fire, he split it, he dribbled around it. Made some tough shots, some scoop shots falling down. He had it going tonight. But I just like the way we kept our composure. I thought in that first quarter defensively we were good and after that Steph [Stephen Curry] got going so it was kind of hard to gauge how good our defense was.”

To counter Curry’s herculean effort, the Clippers got double-digit scoring from six players, outrebounded the Warriors (44-36), and picked up more second-chance points (27-11). Clippers guard Paul George said hitting the glass and playing defense is something the Clippers have done a lot better during the current win streak the team is on.

He attributes that to the work the team puts in when the Clippers are not playing a game.

”Practice,” George said. “Practice is what has been helping. We’ve been drilling it at practice. And it’s been carrying over.”

The Warriors, who beat the Boston Celtics to win the NBA Finals after last season, need more than practice. They need bodies. The team had already faced the reality of losing key players like Gary Payton II, James Wiseman and Otto Porter Jr. from last season’s championship run. The Clippers dominated the paint because the Warriors have no real presence in the middle.

And now they’re faced with the prospect of not having Andrew Wiggins on the court in the postseason, which puts even more pressure to come up big night in and night out.

“Y’all know me,” said Curry. “It’s nice to play well, shoot well, it’s what I expect to do every night, no matter what the stat sheet looks like it’s frustrating when we can’t get over the hump and figure out a way to get a win, especially with where we’ve been all season on the road. Our job is to just keep playing and keep competing at a high level and just try to figure it out. Whatever I got to do in the process individually, just going to keep doing that.”