Now comes the downside to that new extended All-Star break.
The Clippers open the season with four games in five nights, part of a compacted schedule resulting from a weeklong respite during the midseason showcase in New York.
The team will also have to endure four games in five nights two other times — once in December and a final time in February — as well as 19 sets of back-to-back games.
“The back-to-backs are bad, but you can get through those,” Clippers Coach Doc Rivers said Thursday. “The four in fives are brutal. It’s not the league’s fault, there’s just not enough calendar and arena availability to do it any other way.”
This opening stretch includes back-to-back games against the Oklahoma City Thunder on Thursday and the Lakers on Friday followed by an off day and back-to-back games against the Sacramento Kings on Sunday and Utah Jazz on Monday. It’s not an easy, breezy segue into the season.
Rivers recently said he had identified a few games in which he would hold players out, though he said everyone would play throughout the season’s first week.
Although three of the Clippers starters — Chris Paul, Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan — are in their 20s, Rivers said he would closely monitor Paul because the star point guard “is getting up there” and Griffin because of the forward’s high-energy approach to games. Paul will turn 30 in May but didn’t sound enthusiastic about being held out of games to rest.
“I don’t know about all that,” Paul said. “We’ll see when it comes to it.”
Rivers acknowledged that Jordan, 26, was the most likely candidate to play all 82 games because he’s “the biggest pain in the butt taking out of games — in a good way, in a very positive way. He hates not playing.” Jordan has played in 241 consecutive regular-season games, the longest active streak in the NBA.
One way the Clippers could avoid sitting players out, Rivers said, would be to rest them in the latter portion of blowouts. That is, of course, if they can time their routs right.
Etc.
The Clippers exercised their third-year option on forward Reggie Bullock for $2.25 million, extending a vote of confidence in a player who was injured for much of his rookie season. Bullock averaged 2.7 points and 1.3 rebounds in 43 games last season.
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