“A lot,” the coach said.
After a 6-21 start, the Clippers have clawed their way into the play-in tournament. They finished 42-40, extending their best active streak of consecutive winning seasons in the NBA to 15. They are the first team in league history to be 15 or more games under .500 and still finish with a winning record.
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“Usually a team faces adversity maybe once or twice over the course of a season,” Lue said, “but not five or six times.”
The Clippers host Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors in a play-in game on Wednesday night. The winner moves on to an elimination game on Friday. The loser goes home for the summer.
“Pretty noticeable turnaround,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. “I know Ty well. One of his strengths is just staying the course and keeping guys balanced, and that’s not easy to do when you’re 6-21.”
The Clippers’ problems weren’t just on the court.
Kawhi Leonard and the team remain the subject of a league investigation that began last September into whether the Clippers skirted the NBA salary cap to pay Leonard as part of an endorsement deal with a now-bankrupt sponsor. There is no timeline for the outside law firm investigating the matter to conclude.
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The Clippers have said they welcome the investigation and have denied any wrongdoing.
“It doesn’t affect anything we do on a daily basis,” Lawrence Frank, president of basketball operations, said in February. “We know it’s there, we know that at some point a decision will be made.”
The starting lineup took a hit in the opening weeks of the season when Bradley Beal suffered a season-ending fracture that required surgery.
After warmly welcoming Chris Paul to the franchise last fall, the team banished him in December.
He was sent home after a road trip due to a sudden movement. The 40-year-old future Hall of Fame point guard was aiming to retire with the Clippers after his 21st NBA season.
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Then the February trade deadline arrived, and the Clippers shed their tag as the oldest team in the league by trading 36-year-old James Harden and longtime fan favorite Ivica Zubac.
At times, it looked like the turmoil would overshadow the All-Star weekend celebration at their two-year-old stadium.
Lue credited his players’ resilience in enduring a rollercoaster season.
“Not giving up, not giving in, it just shows a lot of the guys in the locker room that care about what they bring to the table every day,” he said.
Kerr compared the Clippers’ resurgence to the 1977-78 Seattle SuperSonics, who started with a dismal 5-17 record that led to the firing of their coach and under new coach Lenny Wilkens finished 47-35. They reached the NBA Finals that season before winning the franchise’s only championship the following year.
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No one is predicting that kind of playoff run for the Clippers, but they have already survived a series of improbable circumstances.
“We always knew we were a better team than we were showing,” senior Brook Lopez said, “but to go out and prove it is a small honor.”
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AP NBA: https://apnews.com/nba