The big win over Boston marks Los Angeles’ fifth straight win.
After a jarring start to the season for the Los Angeles Clippers where they experienced turmoil with poor play and the trade for star James Harden, they have been exceptional ever since. This was further proven Saturday night when they beat the Boston Celtics in their own arena, 115-96, to bring them to a five-game winning streak.
Clippers head coach Ty Lue said to the media after the game that they remembered how the Celtics won the last time they faced off when they were at the Crypto.com Arena. Lue said that this game is a “measuring stick” to compare Los Angeles to another great teams like Boston who carried the best record in the NBA according to Ohm Youngmisuk of ESPN.
“The guys were pretty motivated,” Lue said. “… When they came to L.A., they did us pretty bad. So guys were locked in. This was a game [where] PG, we thought he might be out, but he wanted to play to see where we’re at. Just a measuring stick against a great team. We just wanted to kind of see where we’re at. We had that on our mind.”
Kawhi Leonard, Jrue Holiday on Clippers-Celtics game
Star Kawhi Leonard led the way with 26 points and seven rebounds in the win to Boston and said he was “happy” to hand them a loss on their own floor. However, despite being just over halfway through the season, Leonard admitted that nothing really matters unless they perform like this in the postseason.
“I’m happy that we were able to come in and give the Celtics a loss,” Leonard said. “But it really doesn’t mean nothing until you get to the playoffs and you’re doing the things we did tonight — executing, making shots, playing good defense. It’s good that we had carryover from last night coming from Toronto and winning these back-to-back games. But you got to just keep getting better as the year goes on.”
On the Celtics side, they had a bad shooting night compared to their lights out performance against the Miami Heat last Thursday as this time around, they shot 36 percent from the field and 25 percent from three-point range. Boston guard Jrue Holiday said it was a “old-fashioned a**-whooping” according to Darren Hartwell.
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