Clippers show grit in knockout of champion Spurs

LOS ANGELES – The old men were gone for these playoffs, if not forever, those defending champion San Antonio Spurs having done their legacy proud with a night of jabs, straights and wayward knockout punches that simply weren't enough.

All the world was talking about the boxing match out in Las Vegas, and the real fight for the ages was inside the Staples Center where Floyd Mayweather and his Money Team men so often sit courtside for these Los Angeles Clippers affairs.

Oh, the sweet irony. Floyd missed a hell of a fight.

Clippers 111, Spurs 109 in Game 7, the winners moving on to a second round matchup against the Houston Rockets. A grand total of 31 lead changes, 16 ties. But that's the box score version of what happened here on Saturday night.

After the Clippers survived Game 6 in San Antonio, Paul – then sitting at the postgame podium – was asked about his awful shooting night and how he had started by missing his first seven attempts. He did something that's worth remembering just then, grabbing the actual box score sheet, tossing it aside and announcing to the masses that it doesn't matter.

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Winning matters. Wanting it matters. Earning it matters. Paul, the de facto Star On the Hotseat of this postseason, did all of that in a way that we've never before seen in his much-debated career.

Media members with no rooting interest couldn't stop muttering words like "amazing" and "wow." A national reporter based on the East Coast joked that he would have fired himself on the spot if he had made the ill-fated decision not to cover this game.

Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry, who is no stranger to producing memorable moments, tweeted "I love basketball" after a Patty Mills layup put the Spurs up 107-105 late in the fourth quarter.

It's one thing to hit the game-winner, to bury nine of 13 shots, hit five of six three-pointers, score 27 points and finish with six assists in a game of this magnitude. And that box score in a vacuum, make no mistake, is one worth finding a frame for. But it's quite another to do it after what happened in the first quarter, when Paul pulled up lame with a burning hamstring and found himself in the back tunnels of the arena telling staff members that he might be done.

The naked eye told you that he had no lift, no drive, none of that boost that works so well with that bravado. What he did have, as coach Doc Rivers so delicately intimated afterward, was good, old-fashioned grit. There's no accounting for heart in the box score, but Paul had it in spades against a team that has been using its unstoppable will to win since long before he was even in the league.

Teammates said he had tears in his eyes in the second half, when the hamstring just woudn't leave him alone and he somehow just kept coming. Clippers guard J.J. Redick, who has said before that he couldn't wait to tell his children that he played with Paul, told his point guard yet again when Game 7 was finally over.

"I already said it (to him), right after the game," Redick said. "I'm an emotional guy, and I'm crying with Chris. This just adds to his legend. Twenty years from now, I'm going to talk about this series and this game and that little guy, what heart he has. Man, it was crazy."

For all the talk about how this future Hall of Famer has never taken his team to the conference finals, this one felt as if there should have been a Larry O'Brien trophy hoisted at the end. It was that impressive, that important for their scrutinized group that came so close to being jettisoned into yet another brutal offseason. And no matter what happened at the end, there wasn't a soul alive who could have found a way to be critical of Paul's latest performance.

"I think the narrative (that Paul can't win big in the playoffs) is as dumb for him as it is any Hall of Famer who hasn't won a championship or whatever," Redick continued. "It's a team sport. You have to rely on other people. That's what makes the sport so beautiful."

Rivers, whose desire to become a coach grew during his days as a player in San Antonio in the mid-1990s, said he would be a better person because of the lessons learned in this brutal basketball battle. He channeled his inner Gregg Popovich before this one, telling the Clippers – according to his son and reserve guard, Austin – that they were the best team in the NBA and the basketball world just didn't know it yet. And after they looked like it at the perfect time, Rivers – whose team fell to Oklahoma City in the second round this time a year ago amid all the Donald Sterling controversy that surrounded them – was the first to marvel at the meaning of what they had done and share his favorite part of it all.

"It was all basketball," he said. "It wasn't any crap. It wasn't any fights. It wasn't any – it was just two teams, think about it, playing basketball. It was clean, solid, beautiful basketball by both teams, and I'm a better person because I went through this series. I guarantee you that."

Paul, who entered the NBA out of Wake Forest six years after a baby-faced Tim Duncan and his Spurs won their first title, talked about how beating those "legends" required following one of Rivers' many motivational messages until the end: "don't let go of the rope," he said. "We could have let go of the rope and just thought, it's these guys, we fought hard and we could have just conceded. But we kept fighting."

And what a fight it was.

The fascinating part going forward is that the Clippers are starting to show Spurs-like signs of looking like the old men themselves. It's Year No. 4 of the Paul-Blake Griffin-DeAndre Jordan core being together, and all those successes and failures are piling up in a way that makes them as dangerous as anyone from here until the end.

They are peers now more than ever, these two, in ways that should frighten the Rockets and every other team within the Association. Old men of a different kind who will bound into the second round now, arms raised high.

As Paul and Griffin sat side by side at the podium afterwards, there was a role reversal from those early days when they first joined forces. Griffin, who used to call the Clippers locker room "Daddy Daycare" in their beginning, sat with his adorable 18-month-old son, Ford, on his lap and heaped all kinds of praise on what Paul had done.

"I mean the way he played – not only the way he played, just like his spirit, his resolve," Griffin said. "You guys saw the shots, but you don't see the timeouts, in the huddles, things like that. It was huge. I don't really have a word to describe it, to be honest."

Paul, the proud husband and father of two who carried such a man-among-boys demeanor when he first came to town from New Orleans, discussed his special night knowing full well that they never would have reached that point if not for Griffin's tremendous consistency (24 points, 13 rebounds, 10 assists in the game; 24.1 points, 13.1 rebounds, 7.4 assists, 1.4 steals and 1.4 blocks per game for the series).

But it was his poise down the stretch that sealed the deal, his shot from the right side – hitting the brakes so Danny Green would fly by, over Duncan's outstretched arm, Griffin soaring high for the possible putback – that banked in and caused all this hysteria. Paul made his way to his favorite Clippers season ticket holder, the one and only Billy Crystal, then hugged his brother, C.J., not too far away.

"It's only Round One," Paul would later say, "but that team over there? I mean, it's crazy that that was the first round of the playoffs."

Crazy doesn't even begin to describe it.