The Los Angeles Clippers dropped to 5-15 in 2025-26 with a 114-110 loss to the Dallas Mavericks at the Intuit Dome on Saturday. This was the Clippers’ fourth straight loss and seventh in the last eight games, and the season is going from bad to worse.
Clippers head coach Tyronn Lue was asked postgame if there’s a next step the team can take at this point, as nothing seems to be working, and his response was quite concerning.
“We’ve tried a lot of different things,” Lue said, via Joey Linn. “We’ll keep trying. There’s no next step right now.”
That’s not what you want to hear from the head coach of a team that is now 14th in the West. Lue, who won an NBA championship with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016, had been viewed as one of the best coaches in the league for years, but his stock is tumbling at the moment. The 48-year-old isn’t able to find solutions to problems that have surfaced time and time again.
Some of the themes for the Clippers this season include blowing double-digit leads, losing their way in the third quarter, and getting very little production from the bench. All of that happened against the Mavericks.
The Clippers jumped out to a 20-10 lead here and were up 56-49 at halftime. The Mavericks then went on a 20-11 run to take a 69-67 lead midway through the third, and it seemed like business as usual.
The Clippers responded well to that push, though, as they went on a 10-0 run to seemingly steady the ship. Unfortunately, they were unable to build on that, and the teams were tied at 83 entering the fourth.
The Mavericks had won the third quarter 34-27, and we are seeing teams outplay the Clippers consistently after halftime. They had led by as many as 16 points against the Memphis Grizzlies on Friday, but then lost the third quarter 28-18 to bring their opponents right back into the game. The Grizzlies used that momentum to win 112-107, and the Mavericks did the same here.
Keep in mind, this was also a Mavericks team without Anthony Davis, Kyrie Irving, P.J. Washington, and Dereck Lively II. They had a 5-15 record entering this game and should have been dispatched easily.
Instead, the Clippers allowed Cooper Flagg to have the best game of his career. Flagg put up 35 points (13-22 FG), eight rebounds, and two assists on the night. He is now the youngest player in NBA history to record a 35-point game.
As if all this wasn’t bad enough for the Clippers, they also got next to nothing from their bench. Nicolas Batum, Chris Paul, Kobe Brown, and Kobe Sanders played 67 minutes between them and scored five points. All of those points came from Brown, too. The Mavericks, meanwhile, got 41 points from their bench. That’s too big a deficit.
What’s perhaps the most disappointing about these two latest defeats is that the Clippers have wasted a couple of great games from Kawhi Leonard. Leonard had 39 points in 29 minutes against the Grizzlies and put up 30 in 29 against the Mavericks. The six-time All-Star did miss a couple of shots down the stretch against Dallas, but you can’t be too hard on him when he’s producing like this on a minutes restriction.
This defeat at the hands of the Mavericks meant the Clippers lost 13 games in November. The last time that had happened was in March 2010. They are truly in the dark days at the moment.
The Clippers take on the Miami Heat next at Kaseya Center on Monday at 7:30 PM ET. It’s the start of a five-game road trip, and you wouldn’t fancy their chances of picking up too many wins on it.
