LOS ANGELES — The Nets were 12 minutes away from starting the Circus Trip off with a perfect 3-0 record.
Then Chris Paul decided to take over.
The Clippers star, who has been on the short end of the vast majority of his matchups against friend and fellow 2005 draft pick Deron Williams over the years, scored 17 points in the fourth to help the Clippers (48-22) erase a five-point deficit to start the quarter and hand the Nets (40-29) a 101-95 loss in front of a sellout crowd of 19,506 inside Staples Center.
“We played well, we played hard … we put ourselves in position to win the game, and then they just did a much better job of closing it out than we did,” Nets interim coach P.J. Carlesimo said.
Paul has historically struggled to get wins against Williams — he entered last night’s game 4-14 all-time against Williams in head-to-head matchups — but made sure he left the building with a win over his friend. He went 4-for-7 from the field in the fourth, along with a perfect 9-for-9 from the foul line, while scoring 11 of the final 13 points for the Clippers — including their final seven of the game.
The key moment was when after Brook Lopez slammed home a dunk to tie the game at 90 with 2:32 remaining, Paul came down to the other end of the court and drained a 20-foot jumper to give the Clippers a 92-90 lead with 2:04 remaining, one they would never relinquish.
“I just tried to be aggressive in the ball screen and push the ball,” said Paul, who went down in the first half with a knee injury before returning to the game. “Luckily, we got into the bonus early, which gave me the opportunity to attack, made them grab ahold of me and just try to get to the free throw line as much as possible.”
Meanwhile, Williams, who was taken one pick ahead of Paul in the 2005 NBA Draft, struggled down the stretch. After scoring 11 points in the first half, he missed his first six shots of the second half, and didn’t score until he hit a pair of free throws with 4:12 remaining in the game.
Williams, who has been on fire since the All-Star break, finished the night 6-for-16, including 2-for-8 from 3-point range, and missed a potential go-ahead 3-pointer with 1:50 remaining that would have given the Nets the lead.
“They just pick-and-rolled us to death,” said Williams, who finished with 18 points and nine assists. “I didn’t think we did a good job as a team of defending it in the second half, and that’s pretty much their bread-and-butter down the stretch.”
He also made a crucial mistake when, with less than a minute remaining, he threw a pass to Gerald Wallace on the wing that Jamal Crawford jumped in front of, raced down the court and slammed home to give the Clippers a 94-90 lead with 48 seconds left, robbing the Nets of a chance to get up a potential game-tying or go-ahead shot.
“[Crawford’s] good at that,” Williams said. “Gerald looks like he’s open as soon as I throw it, and then Jamal just kind of sits back and breaks on the ball. He made a good play on the ball, and it was a careless pass by me.
“It was just a huge, costly play that I wish I could get back,” Williams said.
It all added up to the Nets coming up a bit short, as they dropped to 2-1 on the Circus Trip heading into tonight’s game in Phoenix — one that they could play without the services of Joe Johnson, who suffered a right quad contusion that he wasn’t sure how it would feel when he woke up.
“Overall, we played a very good game,” Carlesimo said. “I just think, collectively, there are things we all could have done.
“It is a game of mistakes, and we just made a few too many to beat a really good team in their building.”