LOS ANGELES — When he found out Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Deron Williams and Brook Lopez would all be sitting out against his Clippers on Saturday night, Doc Rivers smelled trouble.
“These games like tonight are very difficult because you have one team that is free and a bunch of pros who want to show everybody that they should be playing, and they are playing at an unbelievable clip as far as intensity, and then you have another team that thought they were playing other guys,” Rivers said before the Nets took on the Clippers. “So it will be interesting.”
“They scare me. They always have as a coach. I’ve won a lot of them and I’ve lost them too, and they are just scary.”
Rivers was right to be scared.
Despite having virtually their entire starting lineup injured — and with the lone healthy starter, Joe Johnson, going 5-for-16 — the Nets gave the Clippers everything they could handle, and even held a double-digit lead early in the second half before the Clippers finally pulled away and claimed a 110-103 victory in front of a sellout crowd of 19,349 at Staples Center.
The Nets (3-6) did their best to stick with the Clippers for as long as they could, even with several stars missing after Garnett (sprained right ankle), Pierce (sore left groin), Williams and Lopez (sprained left ankles) all were injured in Friday night’s 100-98 overtime win over the Suns in Phoenix that forced them all to sit on Saturday.
“The guys who suited up gave us everything they had,” Nets coach Jason Kidd said. “We just came up short.”
“Probably everybody didn’t count on us when they saw [Garnett], Paul and [Williams] and everybody was out,” said Alan Anderson, who scored 15 points. “They probably just said, ‘They had no chance.’ But we could have won the game, so it was encouraging to see we had a chance.”
Even though the Clippers got huge games from Blake Griffin (30 points and 12 rebounds) and J.J. Redick (26 points), and shot over 50 percent from the field, the Nets went into halftime with a 55-54 lead, and for the second straight game had a big run to open the third quarter.
That 10-0 dash by the Nets was powered by a pair of 3-pointers from Anderson and gave the visitors a 65-54 lead early in the third. But after Shaun Livingston’s jumper with 8:43 remaining in the quarter, the Nets would make just one field goal over the next eight minutes, as the Clippers proceeded to go on a 20-2 run and take a 74-67 advantage after a pair of Redick free throws with 1:49 left in the third put the Clippers (7-3) ahead for good.
The Nets got a huge effort from rookie Mason Plumlee, who finished with 19 points and six rebounds and matched the Clippers’ usual high-flying act around the rim with several impressive dunks and finishes inside.
“We have to win games,” Plumlee said. “It’s no secret we have an old team and we have to rest guys. I’m sure [Kidd] has said it to you all as well, but we have to come up with wins and we’re capable of that. It’s not like they’re asking us to do something we can’t do. We can win games with the group we had [Saturday].”
tonight. It was a game like coach said that we played hard, but we have to execute and hit free throws and do the little things and come out with the win.
But although the Nets were never able to retake the lead, they also never went away. Twice they pulled to within one — first on a long 3-pointer by Andray Blatche, who tied for the team lead with 19 points, to end the third, and again on a Joe Johnson runner that capped a 11-5 run that made the score 93-92 with 4:12 remaining.
In the end, though, talent won out, as the Clippers got the ball back after Reggie Evans was called for an illegal screen and Redick drilled a long 3-pointer off a Chris Paul assist to give them a 96-92 lead with 3:25 left. From there, Chris Paul took over, knocking down a 3-pointer to give them a six-point lead with just over two minutes to play, and then hit a jumper from the top of the key to make the score 104-97 with 59.4 seconds left.
The Nets gave it one last run thanks to a dunk from Livingston and a runner from Johnson that cut the lead to 104-101 with 36 seconds left. The Clippers then nearly threw the ball away as the Nets were trying to foul, with Blatche nearly catching a poor lob pass to DeAndre Jordan.
But after the ball was juggled around, Jordan slammed it home to push the Clippers’ lead to five. After Livingston made a jumper to cut the lead to three with 19.1 seconds left, Redick made one of two free throws to give the Clippers a four-point lead and seal the win.