Clamorous comeback by the Los Angeles Clippers entering NBA history against the Detroit Pistons.
The Los Angeles men were down 14 points with three minutes left from the end and managed to win 142-131 in overtime. A crazy event: since 1996 (when play-by-plays appeared in the NBA), it has happened only two other times out of 12875 games that a team would win after being at -14 with so little time.
An unbelievable occurrence, which even coach Tyronn Lue did not believe, who in fact replaced four elements of the base quintet, acknowledging defeat. Instead the second unit with Nicolas Batum (lone of the starting five), Luke Kennard, Terance Mann, Amir Coffey and Moses Brown put up a 16-2 partial, capped by Mann’s triple to tie the game, before Bogdanovic’s unsuccessful attempt. In the overtime the Clippers’ starters also returned to the court and completed the task with a 14-3 run that brought the overall partial for the last 8 minutes to 30-5.
In their history, the Clippers had found themselves down 417 times by 14 with three to go and had never managed to come back. To find similar feats one has to go back to Sacramento’s win over Minnesota in January 2020 and Orlando’s win over Atlanta in 1997. What made the white-and-reds’ success even more curious was the course of the match, which saw LA lead quite easily in the first half only to collapse at the turn of the third and fourth periods. In the final, however, the resounding comeback that earned the sixth win in the last eight games.
