Los Angeles Clippers: A Look Ahead At Life Without Blake Griffin

The Los Angeles Clippers continued winning without Blake Griffin. Can the Clippers keep it up with Griffin out longer than expected?

The Los Angeles Clippers had held down the fort while Blake Griffin was sidelined with a quad injury, but were looking forward to Griffin returning at some point on the team’s five-game road trip.

Despite missing Griffin, the Clippers were hitting their stride and were 11-3 without Griffin before winning again last night against the Indiana Pacers. Things were looking up for the Clippers and adding one of the 10 best players in the NBA to their lineup had ignited a sense of optimism surrounding the Clippers.

Then, this happened.

It was later found that Griffin had broken his hand in an altercation with a team equipment manager at dinner in Toronto.

Ouch.

Griffin’s injury is just the latest example of the Clippers not being able to get out of their own way. Griffin offered a public apology via Twitter.

The team must play on without their superstar power forward for the next 4-to-6 weeks, and potentially longer. The Clippers continue to succeed without Griffin with a 91-89 win against the Pacers and will attempt to finish their Eastern Conference road trip with a 3-2 record with a win over the Atlanta Hawks.

Much has been made about the Clippers having a bit of a favorable schedule while waiting for Griffin to recover from his quad injury he suffered in the Clippers’ Christmas night game against their Staples Center roommate Los Angeles Lakers.

In the 15 games since Griffin was injured, the Clippers have played five games against teams .500 or better and 10 against teams who have losing records. The combined record of their opponents during this string of games is 313-362, good for a win percentage of 46.3.

Credit to the Clippers for going 13-2 against their competition, with the only losses being to the two teams with the best records that they faced, the Cleveland Cavaliers and Toronto Raptors. The combined record of the teams that the Clippers beat during this hot streak goes down to a lowly 42.9 percent. The teams that the Clippers are beating aren’t good, but still you have to give them credit for beating the teams that are on their schedule and doing so without one of their two best players.

While a 13-2 record under any set of circumstances in the NBA is impressive, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s sustainable.

More than likely, the Clippers will not continue winning this frequently without Blake Griffin.

Let’s take a look at what lies ahead for the Clippers.

For projection’s sake, let’s assume that Griffin misses six weeks dating back to yesterday when the news was announced. If Griffin misses exactly six weeks, which marks the end of his “optimistic” return date, his return will be against the Oklahoma City Thunder on March 2nd. If that’s the return date for Griffin, he will have missed the team’s next 14 games.

While the Clippers see a few easy wins on the schedule (hey there Lakers, Wolves, Sixers, Suns, Nets), they’ll have to play a few more tough games than they have been fortunate enough to avoid without Griffin thus far. The highlight of the team’s schedule in this span will be the team’s first two games after the All-Star bBreak, when they face the Spurs on Thursday and then the Warriors on Saturday.

In these 14 games, the schedule has six teams with winning record to eight teams with losing records. The upcoming schedule before the March 2nd matchup with the Thunder has a combined record of 294-343, good for a 46.1 win percentage.

There’s good news and bad news with the upcoming schedule. The best news might be that the Clippers get the All-Star Break to wait on Griffin’s return, lowering the amount of games they’d normally have to play without Griffin.

Other than that, let’s start with the bad news.

The Clippers stand almost no chance against the Spurs and Warriors. The Clippers would need everything they have to win against either of those teams even with Griffin. We can go ahead and pencil those games in as a loss.

The good news is that there are plenty of winnable games ahead. The aforementioned list of the Lakers, Wolves, Sixers, Suns, and Nets are notable because those are the bottom five teams in the league. Those teams (other than the Nets, who don’t own their draft pick) will almost definitely be in full-on tank mode. The game against the Nuggets makes the schedule even more favorable as they currently have the seventh-worst record in the league.

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Assuming that the Clippers remain healthy other than Griffin, these games will almost guarantee that the Clippers play at least .500 basketball the rest of the way until Griffin returns.

The Clippers are four games behind the Thunder for the third seed in the Western Conference and 3.5 games ahead of the Memphis Grizzlies.

It’s extremely unlikely that the Clippers will be able to make up enough ground to overtake the third seed from the Thunder. However as long as they stay above .500, they should still be in good position to remain the fourth seed and secure home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs, something that was crucial in their first round series last season.

The Clippers would obviously prefer that Griffin didn’t punch an equipment manager and not have a broken right hand, but the Clippers should be able to stay afloat without him.