Getty The Clippers wanted no part of the Lakers in the playoffs.
Tanking is hard to prove with 100% certainty, but the Los Angeles Clippers’ final week of the regular season looked suspicious as the team appeared to want no part of the Los Angeles Lakers in the postseason. Thanks to the Clippers’ losses to the Rockets and Thunder, the soonest the two Los Angeles squads could likely square off in the playoffs would be in the Western Conference Finals. A video has since gone viral showcasing the “best” moments of the Clippers’ tanking efforts to close the season.
The Clippers ended up dropping to the No. 4 seed where they will face the Mavericks in the first round. ESPN’s Brian Windhorst revealed the Clippers’ suspect effort has become the talk of the NBA.
“We see teams tank at the end of the season all the time,” Windhorst said on SportsCenter. “That’s not the end of the world, a lot of teams have. What they [Clippers] did here is make moves to avoid the Lakers in round one and round two. We may be sitting here in two months and say, ‘Boy, what a genius move. It was good strategy for how it set up the bracket.’ But boy does it send a strange message to your team, and it certainly sent a message to the Lakers.
As you watch this game against Oklahoma City, yesterday. They weren’t just resting their guys, that was what Ty Lue said they were doing. They were actively not attempting to win. Some of the plays that they ran near the end of this game, I was talking to scouts and executives today, they couldn’t believe some of the stuff they were doing in this game. So, if you’re the Lakers and you may not see them at all this postseason. You may not see them for six or seven weeks or whatever it is. You got to believe that you’re in their head, because that’s the message that the Clippers sent by so actively losing to both the Rockets and the Thunder over the weekend.”
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The Clippers Denied Tanking to Avoid the Lakers
The Clippers denied the idea that the team was tanking down the stretch to avoid the Lakers in the postseason. Clippers head coach Ty Lue instead explained the questionable rotations as a way to ensure the team’s key players are healthy for the playoffs.
“My biggest thing with the luck we’ve had all season, we’re just trying to get our eight or nine guys out and just make sure we’re healthy,” Lue said prior to the Clippers’ season finale loss to the Thunder, per The Athletic’s Law Murray. “I’ll take health over rust any day. That was our main thought. And with the season being so different now, like, when I played, playoffs started in two or three days, with everybody getting about a week off, anyway. One game’s not gonna change, or you’re not gonna get better chemistry in one game and being off seven days anyway. So we talked about it as a staff and as an organization. The best thing for us is now that we have everyone pretty much healthy, we want to go into the playoffs with our guys as healthy as possible.”
Stephen A. Smith: ‘Clippers Should be Ashamed of Themselves’
Count Stephen A. Smith among the skeptics who are not buying Lue’s explanation of the Clippers’ curious meltdown to close the season. During a recent episode of Stephen A.’s World, Smith called out the Clippers saying the team should be “ashamed of themselves” for tanking.
“The Los Angeles Clippers should be ashamed of themselves,” Smith noted, via Yardbarker.com. “And you know it has to be something big for it to bring shame to that franchise, an organization that has never made it to a conference finals in 50 years. They went out and lost on purpose to the Houston Rockets and Oklahoma City Thunder, two of the sorriest teams in the NBA this past season. Dropped both games, sat Kawhi Leonard and Paul George. They want to get out of playing LeBron and the Lakers in the first round of the playoffs. Losing on purpose to avoid the Lakers? Losing on purpose to avoid the team we were told they were going to take out last year? That doesn’t sound like a champion to me.”