The New Orleans Pelicans will travel to Los Angeles this Saturday to challenge the Clippers, who unfortunately lost to the Minnesota Timberwolves in the last playoff game, to decide the last playoff spot in the West, where the winner will secure a place in the 8th place in the West and face the league's First Phoenix Suns in the first round of the playoffs.
The Pelicans certainly want to make the playoffs so their young players have more opportunities to exercise in important games, but first they have to beat the Clippers, though that doesn't seem like much difficulty for them, as they've beaten the Clippers three times this season. But just as the Spurs also maintained an advantage over the Pelicans in the regular season but were eventually eliminated, the regular season record does not really explain anything, after all, it is a life-and-death showdown, so in the previous four games in the regular season, the Pelicans won 3 wins and 1 loss to maintain an absolute advantage is actually not important.
In particular, the Pelicans lost nearly 20 points away from home in their last regular season meeting on April 5, so if they want to win a pivotal game at the Clippers' home and secure a playoff spot, they'll have to work hard. So what can the Pelicans learn from their first three games against the Clippers? How do they avoid a fiasco in the last game?
The pelicans were able to easily beat the Clippers in the first three games but lost miserably in the final game, and the real note is that the Clippers only had four players in double figures in each of the first three games, but in the most recent game, the Clippers had seven players in double figures.
In the Pelicans' fiasco, they had veteran Marcus Morris score 22 points, Ivica Zubac scored 16 points, Luke Kennard scored 14 points, and Paul George in particular scored 27 points. But it's worth noting that George also scored 27 points in the Clippers' loss to the Pelicans in November, suggesting that the pelicans' key to winning is to stop the Clippers' role players from scoring, cutting off George's connection to the three players mentioned above.
The Pelicans' best course of action is undoubtedly to let Herb Jones defend George alone, and the Clippers must not rush to pack up because they are afraid of George's scoring ability, and let other role players get an easy chance to score, because that's how they lost their last game. Even if George plays a very good personal performance, as long as they can stop the players such as Reggie Jackson, Morris, Zubac, Terrance Mann and Kenard, then I believe the Pelicans will not be left behind. The result is that if George has the ability to score 40 points to lead the team to win, then the Pelicans will have to admit their fate, after all, such a superstar is also worthy of the honor of the playoffs, but the Pelicans absolutely cannot accept being defeated by people like Morris and Kennard.