There are only 25 games left in the Clippers’ season, so I thought it was a good time to take a look at the upcoming schedule and Western Conference standings to take stock of LAC’s outlook in the last two months of the 2021-22 NBA season.
The Schedule
I’ve broken the Clippers’ 25 remaining games into two small chunks and two big chunks, primarily because the strength of opponents during these stretches fluctuate and leave the team in between these waves of fixtures where they need to rack up wins for a couple weeks, and then try to just stay alive for a couple weeks. Let’s get into it:
February 3rd – 15th: Hell
Games: 7 (4 played, 3 left)
Days: 13
Home/Road: 3/4
Above/Below .500: 6/1
Combined Opponent W-L: 252-141, 64.1%
This is where the Clippers currently find themselves: Hell. After returning from an absolutely killer 8-game, 13-day road trip to end January where they pulled off a miraculous 4-4 record (I’m fine calling it a miracle since 2 of the 4 were the 24-point comeback in Philly and the 35-point comeback against the Wizards), the Clippers got slammed by as difficult a stretch as any team will have this season: a 7-game stretch where they play games against the teams with the 3 best records in the NBA and the defending champs. For a break, in the other 3 games they got Luka Doncic and the 33-23 Dallas Mavs twice, and their only game against a sub-.500 team was their cross-town rivalry with the Los Angeles Lakers.
This is squarely a “just try to stay alive” stretch. Honestly, even if Paul George and Kawhi Leonard were healthy, you’d take 3-4 in this stretch. The Clippers fortunately barely edged out a win against the Lakers in the first contest of this patch, but are 0-3 since, with @ Dallas, and a vs Golden State/@ Phoenix back-to-back remaining. They’re losing that game in Phoenix on the second night of a back-to-back (with the Suns coming off 2 days off), so they need to pull off the upset in one of the next two. Going 2-5 in this stretch is the benchmark, 1-6 leaves you in a little hot water. Getting one of these next two would be big.
February 17th – March 13th: The Comeback
Games: 10
Days: 25
Home/Road: 4/6
Above/Below .500: 1/9
Combined Opponent W-L: 226-326, 40.9%
If the Clippers can steal one more win in Hell, they’ll be 28-32 heading into February 17th’s game against Houston. This patch of games is obviously much easier, as the numbers above clearly reflect, but that’s all the more reason why the pressure is ON for the Clippers in this stretch. The difficult opponents return to the schedule in the second half of March, so they absolutely need to climb out of the whole while the schedule is friendly to give themselves a margin for error in the final month of the season. Rattling off wins in this stretch might be the difference between holding on to 8th and giving Kawhi Leonard and/or Paul George something to come back to, or falling to 10th/11th and the team packing it in for the season.
Going 9-1 isn’t going to be a cakewalk, though. They get the Rockets 3 times in 2 weeks, and it’s hard to beat the same team three times in a row as they get used to their gameplan. That 3-0 sweep is important, though, as they’re some of the easiest games of the year for LAC. A pair of games to round out the season series with the Lakers is absolutely crucial–we’ll touch on those in the “standings” half of the post. The Hawks are likely to be back above .500 by the time we actually get to that game, and Washington and New York are both fighting for play-in spots. Still, it feels like you really want to aim for 7-3 in this stretch to get back to .500, and settle for no worse than 6-4. And please, when you reach the @ Golden State/vs Washington back-to-back, punt the long-shot Warriors upset hopes to make sure you get the easier home win against the Wizards.
March 14th – April 1st: The Return (?)
Games: 8
Days: 19
Home/Road: 3/5
Above/Below .500: 8/0
Combined Opponent W-L: 264-175, 60.1%
So, right when the Clippers, gasping for air, recover from their brutal January and hellish first two weeks of February to break the surface and start to catch their breath, they go into a patch we might call Hell 2: Electric Boogaloo. Two significant things to note about this fresh hell: while there are no easy opponents in this stretch, the extreme difficulty isn’t as ratcheted up as it was in Hell 1, where the opponent win % was 4% higher despite the presence of the sub-.500 Lakers pulling the group down. The Clippers see more good-but-not-great teams in this match, which makes it a bit easier to go into 8 straight games as the underdogs and come away with 3 wins.
The big thing that will swing the Clippers’ season at this point, though, is the potential returns of Paul George and/or Kawhi Leonard during this stretch. There are only 4 games left after this patch, so any return for those guys would presumably happen at some point during this spell of games at the latest. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to bring Kawhi Leonard back for 3 games. The status of those two guys will have more of an influence on the Clippers’ ultimate season outcome than anything else–if neither are returning, it doesn’t really matter much if you finish 8th, 9th, or 10th or how the play-in tournament goes. And if Kawhi and/or Paul are back, then all of a sudden the good-but-not-great opponents become a lot more beatable.
April 3rd – 10th: The Close
Games: 4
Days: 8
Home/Road: 4/0
Above/Below .500: 1/3
Combined Opponent W-L: 105-119, 46.9%
It’s a bit too early to know exactly how important these games are going to be, but there’s a pretty wide range of “could be four free wins” to “could be three really hard-fought games.” The opponents, all coming to LA as visitors, are New Orleans, Phoenix, Sacramento, and Oklahoma City. The OKC game absolutely needs to be a free, must-win game if seeding is still on the line. The others are more volatile. The Suns should have the NBA’s best record clinched by then and visit LAC on the second night of a road back-to-back, suggesting a likelihood of them resting their core guys. New Orleans (currently 10th) and Sacramento (currently 12th) are both chasing the Clippers in the play-in tournament with aggressive deadline trades. Depending on how the Clippers, Pelicans, Lakers, and King all do in the next 8 weeks, these could be late-season formalities or crucial head-to-heads. It’s likely that at least the New Orleans game, which comes first, carries some level of stakes. Sacramento may already be eliminated by the time the Clippers see them on the penultimate night of the season.
The Standings
Looking Up
Frankly, the Clippers finishing above their current 8-seed feels really unlikely, with an ouside shot at 7th. Above that, 6th place currently belongs to the Denver Nuggets, who are 30-24 (to LAC’s 27-30) and rumored to be getting some stars of their own back from injury soon. Denver is currently on a 46-win pace, which LAC would have to go 19-6 in the 25 games we just walked through above to catch. If Denver regresses a bit and goes .500 (14-14) in their remaining games, they’d finish 44-38, and LAC would have to go 17-8 to catch them. I can’t see the Clippers getting to 17 wins, even in a best-case scenario where they play amazingly down the stretch, and I have a hard time seeing Denver close below .500 since their remaining strength of schedule is easier than the games they’ve played so far. There’s an outside shot that an outright collapse from the Nuggets (or Mavericks, who are just ahead of Denver) opens the door for LAC, but the door is currently squarely shut. No other teams are even remotely in play.
Even the 7th-place Minnesota Timberwolves have begun to pull away from the Los Angeles teams, now sitting at 29-26 with both LA teams at 30 losses. The Wolves do now have the third-toughest remaining strength of schedule in the conference… but the Lakers have the toughest, and the Clippers have the second-toughest. The Clippers do have the bonus of holding the head-to-head tiebreaker against Minnesota, but it’s hard to see them making up enough ground to force that tie unless their stars have returns that are early and effective.
Looking Sideways
This is the big one–in all likelihood, the Clippers and Lakers are going to finish 8th and 9th in some order. And if they don’t, it’s more likely that someone from behind caught up than someone from ahead dropped down.
The Clippers hold a narrow edge over the Lakers, tied in the loss column with one extra win and one extra game played. The Lakers’ advantage going forward is clear: LeBron James and Anthony Davis, both of whom have missed time this season, are healthy now. They still haven’t been a good team, losing this week to Justise Winslow’s tanking Portland Trail Blazers, but 10-9 in the games where both play is better than 16-21 when they have just one or neither. There’s also a chance that the Lakers get notably better on the buyout market, just because their current role players are so, so awful. Even getting a couple of playable guys would raise the floor for some of their lineups–though we’ll have to see if the allure of LeBron can outweigh the dysfunction and sub-.500 record for ring-chasing veterans.
The Clippers have some important advantages, too. First of all, they currently lead the season series between the two sides 2-0, giving them a huge headstart on the tiebreaker. Second, while the Clippers do have a difficult remaining schedule (combined opponent win %: 52%), the Lakers have the most difficult remaining schedule in the league (55%). As far as talent goes, the Clippers got better at the deadline while the Lakers stood pat, and any improvement the Lakers might expect from getting an extended stretch with LeBron and AD both on the court would pale in comparison to the potential improvement to the Clippers if George and Leonard return.
As if rooting against the Lakers nightly wasn’t already a part of being a Clippers fan, it really is important for the Lakers to rack up every loss possible from here on out. The two remaining head-to-head contests, on February 25th and March 3rd, are also crucial. Both teams have the first as their first game back from the All-Star break, while neither has a rest advantage for the second game. If the Clippers can get a split, they’d clinch the tiebreaker for the season as well as deprive the Lakers a chance to win one of the easier games remaining on their schedule (based on current standings, just 9 of the Lakers’ 26 remaining games come against teams under .500–two of those are 8th-place LAC, and three come against 10th-place New Orleans). If the Lakers do get both head-to-head games, the race is officially on. The second tiebreaker is division record. LAC currently has 4 divisional wins to LAL’s 2, but in order to make this relevant LAL would need to pick up 2 more in the head-to-heads. From there, here’s who each team has left:
LAC: PHX x2, GSW x2, SAC x1
LAL: PHX x2, GSW x3
In theory, that favors the Clippers because they get to play the only bad opponent again, but we’ll have to see if either team can nab upsets in their remaining contests against the Suns or Warriors.
Looking Down
Of the six teams beneath the Lakers in the Western Confernce, only two stick out as concerning: New Orleans and Sacramento. The Spurs (5 losses back) won’t totally bottom out but they don’t appear threatening, while the Rockets and Thunder are actively trying to lose games to improve their draft odds (please Clippers go 4-0 in the remaining games vs those two teams). The Trail Blazers can’t totally be counted out, since they technically sit in 11th place and have the easiest remaining strength of schedule in the conference, but with Damian Lillard out for the season and a large bulk of the team’s other talent moved without much significant return at the trade deadline, it would appear to only be a matter of time before they fade to a comfortable 13th.
With the Pelicans and Kings, it comes down to just how good they wind up being after the blockbuster additions of CJ McCollum and Domantas Sabonis. Right now, though, the Clippers’ hold on a top-9 finish should be safe as long as they can manage to be respectable down the stretch–although their poor head-to-head performances (0-3 vs New Orleans, 1-2 vs Sacramento this year) don’t help on the tiebreaker front of the race becomes close. If the Clippers finish 10-25, which feels like a really sturdy floor based on the schedule we just went over, in order to tie them New Orleans would have to finish 15-12 while Sacramento would have to finish 16-9. It’s not impossible, but for the Clippers to fall below 9th they’d have to really collapse and the Pels and/or Kings would have to not just improve w/ their new additions but improve drastically–something that is probably a little more possible if the Pelicans get good news on the mysterious continued absence of Zion Williamsion.
I described the Clippers’ prospects of moving higher than 7th in the West by saying that the door was shut, and they’d have to wait and see if someone opened it for them by collapsing down the stretch. The race for 8/9 with the Lakers is essentially a coin flip. As far as a fall below 9th, I think the door isn’t quite shut, but only a bit ajar, with LAC well within their power to slam it shut in the coming weeks. I’ll be watching the standings with more concern about the Pelicans and Kings than hope about the Mavericks or Nuggets, and it’s likely that these margins will get a little slimmer as the Clippers navigate the last few games of Hell 1.0, but I’ll hold off on the alarm bells until either LAC underperforms in their soft stretch or one of those teams shows signs of being capable of an amazing close.
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