Anyone who’s been watching the Clippers since the Kawhi/PG era started knows that this is who the Clippers are. When there were iterations of this team pre-2019 is when this team thrived. Why? Because there was no pressure. No one expected anything from them. And with no expectations they “thrived.”

This was true coming into this season too. Not a single media pundit had the Clippers winning the title this season. Hell, most of them didn’t even have the Clippers as a top-6 team in the West. And with those expectations being non-existent, the team was out to prove those people wrong. Westbrook especially seemed to be playing with an insane fire under him.

Now, after acquiring James Harden, the championship pressure is back on. For the first time this morning this season, there was a segment about a Clippers regular season game on ESPN (First Take) that wasn’t Clippers/Lakers. They’re back under the spotlight and I think the big 4 know that.

Harden knows he can’t be selfish or he’ll be scrutinized by the media so he passes up open catch-and-shoot threes to dribble and find a more open man. He wants to fit in so he can get that fat contract.

Westbrook knows he has about 10 games to prove he can fit next to Harden and is doing too much to compensate. He doesn’t wanna go back to being a bench player. He’d be open to the role like he was with the Lakers, but I’m sure he’d prefer not to. Before the Harden trade, it seemed he was taking what the defense was giving him during a fast break in transition. Scoring at will and taking great shots. Now he’s trying to force stuff to happen in transition to prove his worth/fit which is leading to heavily contested layups and bad errors.

Paul George has always been too overly willing to sacrifice shots for how good of a scorer he is. He did better in yesterday’s game against Brooklyn, but taking 11 shots against the Knicks is crazy. He seems way too eager to return to his facilitator role where he tries to create shots for worse scorers (seeing PG pass up a 3 so Morris could back up a defender in the post to attempt and miss a step back fadeaway long 2 would always kill my soul). And now this man is giving up fast break dunk attempts to behind-the-back pass to PJ Tucker? Stop it.

Same thing can be said about Kawhi. Trying too hard to adjust. Unless he’s injured or banged up again, is there any reason why Kawhi shouldn’t be running on the fast break? He’s averaging a career-low in FTAs this season because he’s turning very much into a set, catch, gather, and shoot player. And it’s disappointing cause he tries to shoot over a double-team cause the other team isn’t worried about him passing it out to Zubac or Westbrook.

They’re in their own heads right now. Again. We saw this after they acquired Westbrook. It took like… what? 5-6 games and 5 straight losses to get back on track? But once they did they looked great.

And yeah you can nitpick and say things like the team is too slow, Zubac needs to be traded, Norm needs to be traded, Westbrook has to go to the bench, etc etc. But none of that is gonna mean anything if the wrong players are sacrificing the wrong things.