This town ain't big enough for the both of us

Are we finally getting the long-awaited Los Angeles basketball rivalry?

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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Friar Pedro Shoots El Maragato as His Horse Runs Off; Francisco Goya; 1806

The Clippers entered Wednesday’s showdown with the Lakers — the final regular season Clippers home game at STAPLES Center against the real key tenants of the building — missing Paul George and Ivica Zubac. The Lakers, 7-3 in their last 10 coming in, had an opportunity to come in and get a statement game against a top-4 seed who had faltered a bit of late.

Thirteen seconds into the fourth quarter, D’Angelo Russell threw a pass right to Russell Westbrook, who is not on the same team. Westbrook hit Mason Plumlee in transition as the Clippers took a 21-point lead over the Lakers.

That should have been the death knell for the Lakers on this night. But LeBron James, quietly shooting 40% from three for the second time in his career, made sure the game would finish interesting. LeBron, closing in on 40,000 career points, hit three triples in the Lakers’ next six possessions, cutting the deficit to nine and forcing Ty Lue to take a timeout and get Kawhi Leonard back in the game.

From there, LeBron hit two more threes and both Russell and Rui Hachimura made some clutch plays. In that critical fourth, the Lakers scored 37 points in 23 possessions, with LeBron himself putting up 19 on 12 shooting possessions. The Clippers, playing mostly through James Harden, scored just 16 points in 21 possessions. Six of those possessions ended in turnovers. Leonard and Harden took a single three between them.

Fittingly given the teams’ histories since becoming roomies in 1999 and sharing the same town since 1984, the Lakers won the final regular season game in an arena dressed up in Clipper colors but filled with Lakers fans.

(Funnily enough, per Stathead, the Lakers are 48-50 in the regular season against the Clippers since STAPLES Center opened. One of those Lakers’ win was played in the bubble. The rivals have famously never met in the playoffs.)

Letting a middling offense led by a 39-year-old come back from down 21 in the fourth by shooting the lights out certainly raises questions about the Clippers’ readiness for three rounds of difficult Western Conference tests. Failing to score on so many possessions late in a hotly contested game a few nights after the same story presented itself against a worse defense (the Kings) is a real red flag. Not having two of the team’s top six players in PG and Zu is fair to call out; this type of collapse is not a foreign concept for at least one of the key engines of this team (Harden), though, and this loss can’t possibly sit easily in that regard.