The Golden State Warriors beat the Los Angeles Clippers on Tuesday night, despite having nothing significant to play for after clinching the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference over the weekend, despite sitting starting power forward Draymond Green and despite a 40-point, 12-rebound, five-assist explosion by Blake Griffin in his best game since returning from elbow surgery. The Warriors came back from a 17-point first-half deficit to win their 10th straight game, improve their league-best record to 61-13, and move to a sterling 27-11 record away from the friendly confines of Oracle Arena.
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Then again, Staples Center wasn't exactly a brutal environment for the boys in blue on Tuesday. In fact, as Stephen Curry headed to the foul line for a pair of critical lead-padding free throws in the closing seconds, a smattering of "M-V-P" chants could be heard coming down from the stands in the Clippers' gym:
Yes, Clippers fans eventually rose up to drown out the chants with boos, but the moment seemed to encapsulate an evening-long trend. In a late-season battle between two long-beefing rivals that had significant playoff implications for the Clippers, the hometown team at times seemed to be playing at a neutral site, listening to what sounded like a pretty raucous Staples crowd featuring a host of Dubs fans celebrating the visitors' play nearly as much as their own.
It's safe to say that Griffin noticed.
From Arash Markazi of ESPN Los Angeles:
"Home-court advantage is just not there for us," Griffin said after the game. "If that's how it feels in the playoffs, it's not looking good."
Warriors fans made Staples Center sound more like Oracle Arena on Tuesday night. They loudly cheered every made basket by Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, and chanted "M-V-P" when Curry was at the free throw line, causing several Clippers players to look up into the stands and shake their heads.
"I don't know what we could do, but it would be great if it wasn't that way," said Griffin, who had 40 points in the loss. "It's kind of like when we play the Lakers. I don't know, maybe worse. It's one of those things where it would be great if it wasn't like that."
The All-Star power forward wasn't the only Clipper who heard the in-Staples split. From Andrew Flohr of Warriors blog Golden State of Mind:
When asked about the crowd, Doc Rivers smiled and admitted to a significant split, saying "I love our crowd, I didn't like their crowd."
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To be fair, the Warriors did sort of a lot of the type of cool stuff that makes fans — yours, theirs, somebody else's, it doesn't matter — stand up and cheer. The highlight, of course, was Curry's second-quarter behind-the-back double-cross on Chris Paul, presented here in luscious Phantom-Cam slow-motion:
It was a move that sent the Warriors' bench reeling, had the entire house begging for Jumbotron replays, launched what Andrew Bogut accurately predicted would "be a lot of memes" (including a Twister Photoshop that made even Paul himself laugh) and prompted perhaps the best perimeter defender in the NBA to say, "Luckily for me, we do not play one-on-one every night".
Here's the damnedest thing is: Steph didn't just stop doing cool stuff after that. He got CP3 again in the third quarter, as the Warriors continued their comeback:
... and he hit an absolutely unfair catch-and-shoot triple with Paul draped all over him to give Golden State its first lead of the game a few minutes later:
And Curry wasn't the only Warrior who put a charge into the Clippers' crowd. Marreese Speights absolutely hammered one home on the unfortunately-ill-equipped-to-protect-the-rim Glen Davis, eliciting absolutely understandable oohs and aahs from the peanut gallery:
I mean, of course you're going to get neutrals, nonpartisans and even a fair amount of hometown fans who just love it when cool stuff happens to respond positively to plays like that. It'd be more surprising if people didn't go nuts for them.
That said, this isn't the first time in recent memory a Staples crowd has fallen somewhat short of the Clippers' expectations.
Griffin and Paul bemoaned the fans' lack of engagement during a November loss to the Chicago Bulls, with Griffin saying Staples was loud "in the wrong way" and Paul saying it "somewhat felt like a road game." Center DeAndre Jordan struck a similar note after a January home loss to the Miami Heat, sarcastically saying that "when we played on the road in Miami, it was tough." This might not necessarily be a regular occurrence, but it's not exactly a rarity, either.
And that, to some degree, is to be expected. For one thing, Los Angeles has always been a Lakers town and remains one, even with the purple-and-gold suffering through one of the worst down cycles in franchise history. Yes, the Clippers have been the superior Staples tenant for several years now, but generating and sustaining a strong fanbase is a long game, and Steve Ballmer's club has only recently begun the process of growing something new from the soil that Donald Sterling spent decades salting.
Mix in the fact that L.A.'s full of transplants from other towns, that the Warriors' faithful is both rabid and nearby enough distance to travel in bunches, and that there are few things in today's NBA more cheer-compelling than Chef Curry cooking — he'd finish with 27 points on 8-for-15 shooting and four assists in the win — and you've got a recipe for the sort of drown-out that'd be unthinkable in Oracle, the Moda Center up in Portland or some of the league's other toughest gyms.
This doesn't mean that there's no home-court advantage for the Clips, of course. They've gone 27-11 at home this year, rolled up a 117-36 mark in home games since Paul joined the club four seasons ago, and have benefited from the surge of the crowd in years past; Griffin and Paul both credited the Staples fans for providing a huge lift in L.A.'s Game 3 win over the Memphis Grizzlies back in 2012, for example. Whether it winds up being a problem come this postseason, though, remains to be seen.
The Clips, currently slotted in fifth place in the West, could find themselves with home-court advantage should they face the Portland Trail Blazers, who will get a higher seed should they win the Northwest Division, but aren't guaranteed a home start if their first-round opponent finishes up with a better record. (Portland enters Wednesday's action percentage points ahead of L.A., having played two fewer games with one fewer win and one fewer loss; as luck would have it, the Blazers and Clips square off on Wednesday night.)
Should current seeding hold, though, and the Clippers advance past Round 1, they'd be staring down a seven-game set with these same Warriors and their rowdy band of supporters. The Clips' game ops crew might want to start mic'ing up the owner just to tilt the sonic scales. I hear he's an excitable sort.
Hat-tip to Deadspin's Tom Ley on the video of Griffin's postgame comments.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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