Only one member of the Houston Rockets would admit to hoping to face the LA Clippers in the first round of the Western Conference playoffs in the wake of the road team’s 135-103 rout Wednesday night at Staples Center.
For Austin Rivers, it’s about purely personal reasons, a chance to claim family bragging rights and to beat the team that traded him last summer. Chris Paul played it coy, but Rivers knows he feels the same way.
“Absolutely, you could see it tonight in the way he played,” Rivers told ESPN after Paul torched the Clippers for 27 points and seven assists, a performance highlighted by a 60-foot buzzer-beater to end the third quarter. “You play your former team, that’s what you do. It would make it even more competitive. And they’re a good team.
They would come at us, because a lot of their guys played over here. So it would be a fun series.”
The rest of the Rockets? They really don’t care who comes to the Toyota Center to open the playoffs next weekend.
It’s likely to be the Clippers in a matchup of third and sixth seeds, a probability that increased with the result of Wednesday’s head-to-head, as well as wins by the second-place Denver Nuggets and fifth-place Utah Jazz. If that’s the case, the Rockets will consider this blowout win to be irrelevant.
“You can’t really make too many statements,” Paul said dismissively, pointing out that the Clippers are a much tougher team with Pat Beverley. The pitbull guard, who was part of the package the Rockets gave up to get Paul to co-star with James Harden, sat out Wednesday night with a hip injury.
One statement the Rockets will make with confidence: They’re capable of beating anybody if they keep rolling like they have been recently.
“If we’re doing what we’re supposed to do, nobody can beat us,” forward PJ Tucker told ESPN. “Anybody, don’t matter. … If we play at this level, we’re going to win. I don’t care who we play. If we play like we play tonight, we’re going to win.”
