Los Angeles Clippers head coach Ty Lue has had a successful gameplan when it comes to limiting Portland Trail Blazers superstar Damian Lillard, who has struggled over his last 6 games playing the Clips.
Lillard was held to 12 points and committed 4 turnovers in Monday night’s 116-86 loss to Los Angeles.
Lillard has managed 17.2 ppg over the last 6 games against the Clippers, shooting 31.7%, a marked dip from what we are used to seeing from Lillard.
Lue explained how the team has had success, of sorts, against a player as explosive as Lillard, who can take over a game at any time.
“We just try to blitz him, keep the ball out of his hands as much as possible,” Lue said, according to ClutchPoints’ Tomer Azarly. “We know he’s a dangerous scorer and he can get going any time and we all know that, the world knows that, so we just tried to limit his shots as much as possible by blitzing him and taking him out of pick-and-roll situations. Only limiting him to 15 shots was pretty good. Just try to keep him off balance and I thought our team defense did a great job. Like I said, it’s not one person, it’s all five guys and our guys did a great job of keying in on him.”
“I think our activity defensively was really good,” Lue continued. “Not too many game plan mistakes today. I thought we did a good job, we had a couple times we went under on CJ when we weren’t supposed to, but for the most part we did a good job sticking to the game plan. I think offensively PG and Reggie, like you said, struggled, but we did a great job of moving the basketball. I thought we got open shots. We had 37 assists, but we should have had 50, I thought we had 15 shots that were wide open that we didn’t make. We keep playing that way, we’re gonna be pretty good, gotta just continue to keep building. Gonna talk about that all season long.”
