Blake Griffin accelerated through the paint and threw down a vicious dunk right on Aron Baynes’s head in the third quarter. A few minutes later, Griffin did it again to the same poor San Antonio centre.
After three years of early-round failures, the Los Angeles Clippers are hungry for their first major taste of post-season success. As Griffin proved, they’ll jump all over the defending champions Spurs as many times as necessary to advance.
Chris Paul scored 32 points, Griffin added 26 points and 12 rebounds, and the Clippers surged in the second half for a 107-92 victory Sunday night in their first-round series opener.
Jamal Crawford added 17 points as the Clippers stayed comfortably ahead down the stretch, meeting the defending champs’ challenge to start off a difficult post-season opening match-up for two powerful teams.
“They’re still the defending champs, and they’re going to be the defending champs every night,” Clippers coach Doc Rivers said. “We have a lot of confidence in our team, but you just have to stay humble and respect who you’re playing.”
Game 2 is Wednesday night.
Paul and Griffin took control in the third quarter with a 24-10 run. Griffin got his roof-raising, back-to-back dunks off pick-and-roll plays, throwing down in vintage “Lob City” style after avoiding some acrobatic dunks this season to protect his health.
“I just want to be aggressive,” Griffin said. “I don’t want to settle for anything, because now is not the time to have the mindset of self-preservation.”
Kawhi Leonard scored 18 points for the Spurs, who had won the opening game in their previous 11 play-off series. Tim Duncan had 11 points and 11 rebounds, but the Spurs couldn’t rally from their hefty second-half deficit.
“The game was their defence was better than our offence,” coach Gregg Popovich said. “Their aggressiveness, their athleticism, their physicality really hurt us offensively. I actually felt decent at half-time ... and then they had that run, but I thought it was their defence.”
Tony Parker rolled his ankle early on and managed just 10 points on 4-of-11 shooting for the Spurs, who slipped to the sixth seed in the Western Conference in their season finale. That loss at New Orleans forced them to open their chase of their sixth NBA title against the hungry Clippers, who have never reached a conference final.
Both teams headed into the post-season with enormous momentum: Los Angeles won 14 of their final 15 games to finish with 56 victories and the NBA’s third-best record, while San Antonio won 14 of 16 and 11 straight before the season finale.
“We give them a lot of credit, because they sustained it longer than we did,” Duncan said. “They played harder longer. They had the energy with their home crowd behind them.”
The Clippers anticipate considerably less post-season turmoil than they faced last season, when team owner Donald Sterling was banned from the NBA for life during the club’s first-round series against Golden State after his racist remarks were revealed. The Clippers beat the Warriors in seven games after dumping their warm-up shirts at centre court in Oakland in a gesture of solidarity against Sterling.
In Memphis, Beno Udrih scored 20 points in the best play-off game of his career, and the Memphis Grizzlies never trailed in routing the Portland Trail Blazers 100-86 in the opener of their first-round series.
It was a big help to make sure the Grizzlies can ease Mike Conley and Tony Allen back into the line-up from their injuries.
“Beno gets the game ball,” Grizzlies forward Zach Randolph said. “With Mike being out, helps him get his confidence up and playing.”
Udrih hit his first six shots coming off the bench late in the first quarter, and he allowed Conley to sit the entire fourth quarter in his first game back after missing four with a sprained right foot. In his 44th career play-off game, Udrih finished with seven assists and seven rebounds – the first reserve to do that in the post-season since Nick Van Exel on May 10, 2003, for Dallas at Sacramento.
Randolph had 16 points and 11 rebounds, and Marc Gasol added 15 points and 11 rebounds. Mike Conley finished with 16 points and didn’t play the fourth quarter. Jeff Green had 11.
LaMarcus Aldridge led Portland with 32 points while taking more shots than anyone had ever taken against Memphis in the post-season, going 13-of-34. Damian Lillard added 14 points, shooting 5-of-21 overall and 0-of-6 beyond the arc. Nicolas Batum had 15 points. The Trail Blazers have lost five straight overall.
“I think a good wakeup call for us,” Aldridge said. “But definitely tonight they manhandled us.”
Game 2 is Wednesday night in Memphis.
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