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Chris Paul: For Clippers, Staples Center 'hasn't really been a home court'
The Los Angeles Clippers enter the 2016-17 NBA season in a similar spot to the one they’ve occupied for the past couple of campaigns: as a team with enough top-line talent to harbor championship aspirations, but with enough potential holes to leave you unconvinced they’ll definitely be able to stand toe-to-toe with the league’s biggest and baddest superpowers. And while they seem a sound bet to amass enough wins to earn a top-four spot in the Western Conference playoff bracket for the fifth straight year, even if they do, All-Star point guard Chris Paul’s at least somewhat concerned that they’ll face a familiar problem: that the home-court advantage they’ll earn won’t be worth quite as much as you’d hope.
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From Dan Woike of the Orange County Register:
Before the Clippers’ practice Saturday, Chris Paul wanted to talk about the problem, pivoting on a question about [a] quick start to a different line of thought.
“One of the biggest things for us is our home court hasn’t really been a home court,” Paul said. “I don’t know. For some reason we just haven’t made it a tough place to play.
“ … Obviously it’s our mentality. We’re the ones playing. We have to give our crowd something to cheer about, something to get behind. We’ve got to make Staples Center, for our home games, a tough place to play.”
It’s worth noting that the Clippers have been a very good home team ever since Paul came over from the New Orleans Hornets before the start of the lockout-shortened 2011-12 season. Since Paul’s arrival to team up with Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan, the Clips own a 149-48 record at Staples Center, a .756 winning percentage that stands as the third-best in the NBA over the past five years.
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The problems:
• It’s also third-best in their own conference, with the San Antonio Spurs (168-29, .853) and Oklahoma City Thunder (155-42, .787) both slotting in ahead;
• L.A.’s home win totals have dropped in each of the last two seasons, from a 34-7 mark in Doc Rivers’ first year at the helm to 30-11 in 2014-15 and 29-12 last year;
• Last year’s home record came in well behind the paces pushed by the teams that finished ahead of the Clips in the West — OKC went 32-9, the Golden State Warriors were 39-2 and the Spurs finished 40-1 — as well as the conference finalists in the East (the Cleveland Cavaliers went 33-8, while the Toronto Raptors were one game behind at 32-9);
• This brand of being-very-good-but-not-quite-the-best has kind of been the overall issue for the Clippers over the past five years, hasn’t it?
This isn’t the first time a member of the Clippers has publicly noted that the team doesn’t necessarily have the league’s most terrifying home-court advantage.
Two seasons back, both Griffin and Paul bemoaned the fans’ lack of engagement during a loss to the Chicago Bulls, with Griffin saying Staples was loud “in the wrong way” and Paul saying it “somewhat felt like a road game.” Two months later, Jordan struck a similar note after a home loss to the Miami Heat, sarcastically saying that “when we played on the road in Miami, it was tough.”
Several months later, Griffin again noted a relative lack of enthusiasm in the gym — for the home team, at least — during a loss to the Warriors that saw fans in the Staples stands chanting “M-V-P” as Curry drilled the Clips for 27 points.
“Home-court advantage is just not there for us,” Griffin said. “I don’t know what we could do, but it would be great if it wasn’t that way.”
This kind of makes sense. For one thing, while the Clippers have been far and away the better basketball club in their home arena in recent years, Los Angeles is, was and likely ever shall be a Lakers town. Nobody doubts Steve Ballmer’s commitment to changing that, but developing a strong and loyal fanbase is a long game, and it’s going to take a long time and sustained success to promote new growth after decades of Donald Sterling’s toxic stewardship.
For another, L.A.’s full of transplants who might claim stronger allegiances to the visitors than the home team on any given night. Mix in what some longtime fans have bemoaned as the pricing-out of serious supporters, and you’ve got a recipe for a tepid response from the seats. That’s before you consider the fact that … y’know … the Clippers lost the games after which they carped, and that, five years after the generation-shifting trade for CP3, they’ve still yet to get out of the second round of the playoffs to make the kind of extended postseason run that can turn passive observers into newly minted, dyed-in-the-wool die-hards.
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All that said, Paul and Jordan made sure to make clear to Woike that his comments about the home-court issue weren’t intended as a dig at the fans:
“I feel like when we’re at home, we rely on our crowd, we rely on, ‘OK, we’re at home,’” [Jordan said.] “But [when] we’re on the road, we know it’s us against everybody else in this arena, so that’s more motivation, more fire, I guess. So, we’ve got to find that same fire at home.” […]
“Don’t get it twisted. Our crowd is behind us all day every day,” Paul said. “But, it’s us that have to give them a reason to a cheer and all that stuff like that. That’s on us as a team. The way we come out, we’ve got to provide that energy.”
There’s a tenuous sort of momentum associated with building a real home-court advantage. Knock off a couple of top-flight opponents, win a couple of big games in front of the local fans, and all of a sudden the interest starts to accrue; the stands get louder, the calls get harder to hear, the court seems to shrink. The Clippers have the talent to post a top-three or four offense, perhaps a bit more depth than last year’s model, and plenty of motivation to take advantage of major losses elsewhere in the West and establish themselves as the most clear and present threat to a Warriors team for whom they bear no love.
With a road-heavy season-opening slate that will see them play 12 of their first 21 games away from Staples Center, the Clippers will have only a couple of early-season opportunities to get the ball rolling — a Nov. 2 visit from Russell Westbrook and the Thunder, a Nov. 9 matchup against Damian Lillard and the Portland Trail Blazers team that knocked L.A. out of last year’s postseason — before the game they’ve surely had circled on the calendar for months: Wednesday night, Dec. 7, against Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant and Golden State.
Take care of business there, and the Clips might start to make everybody — including themselves — believe that this could really be the year. Fall short, though, and the primary noise CP3 and company hear reverberating in their own gym might be the grim, familiar sound of inevitability.
Hat-tip to Kurt Helin of ProBasketballTalk.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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