Steph’s year as a Toronto middle school ringer

The LA Clippers were beaten soundly by the Atlanta Hawks at home on Sunday night. Following that loss, several Clippers talked about how the team needs to figure things out with the playoffs looming.

When asked if LA feels like they can just flip a switch, Paul George said “I mean, that’s what we’re appearing to look like, which is not good. Not good. We want to be a team that’s consistent and we want to establish an identity. I’ve always spoken about having an identity and I think it’s extremely important. When you’re a team that has an identity, teams know what they’re going up against. Right now, I don’t think we have an identity.”

Related to the same topic, Clippers head coach Ty Lue said his team needs to be better at matching the opponent’s energy from the start.

“We definitely can play harder for a 48-minute stretch. It can’t be 32 minutes or it can’t be when you get down. That comes with a veteran team. They think we can turn it on, but these teams are young, they’re fast, they’re turning it on from jump ball, so we got to be able to keep up and we got to be able to match that,” Lue said. “Nothing to overreact to like the guys in the locker room, they understand what we need to do… I told you we have things we got to do consistently every single night. And if you don’t do that, you can consistently get beat by anybody.”

Kawhi Leonard chalked up the loss, as he has other games recently, to a lack of effort from the Clippers.

“We didn’t really give all the effort that we could have gave,” Leonard said.