Rivalry Game: Lakers at Clippers

The City of Los Angeles has no professional football team, but it does have two basketball teams: the Lakers and the Clippers.

For an eternity, the Clippers succeeded in being as bad as the Lakers were good. While the purple and gold were counting championship rings, the red, white and blue were counting lottery balls. For as long as the Buss family owned the Lakers, that's how the story went.

One moment would change all that forever: the Chris Paul trade.

It happened, but then, it didn't.

"We have to move on," Lakers President Jeanie Buss said about the vetoed Paul trade in a Tuesday appearance on ESPN Radio's Mason and Ireland show.

The Lakers had CP3, and Dwight Howard would be the final piece. Howard still came, of course, but Steve Nash was no Paul. Heck, Nash wasn't even Nash. Instead, the Clippers landed Paul, and one of their lottery balls had finally panned out and looked like a franchise player.

Blake Griffin scored 39 points, pulled down seven rebounds and handed out four assists in a 118-111 Clippers' victory on the Lakers' home court when these two teams last met. A little over two months later, Griffin is averaging 22.5 points, 7.7 rebounds and 4.9 assists per game.

Since returning from three games out due to fatigue and old age, an evolving 36-year-old Kobe Bryant constantly lives under triple-double watch averaging 17.0 points, 8.5 rebounds, 8.0 assists and 1.75 steals per game. For everyone overwhelmed by those stats, Bryant has been passing almost as well as Chris Paul, 9.5 assists per game, and pulling down more rebounds than Griffin, 7.7 rebounds per game.

On Wednesday, the Lakers "travel" to face the Clippers as downtown LA promises a festive feel in the warm winter weather of the South land. Both teams will dress in their home lockers. Fans will fill LA Live. Local celebrities and media will rush to the event, but in this case, the local celebrities are world famous superstars.

These teams last met on Halloween night, and that game came down to Bryant missing a 17-foot shot that would have given the Lakers the lead with 27 seconds left in the game. Instead, the Lakers played the free throw game and inevitably lost 118-111.

That night, Bryant played 35 minutes and finished with 21 points, seven assists and four rebounds. On Wednesday night, the 36-year-old will likely stay around the 32 to 33 minutes Lakers coach Byron Scott has targeted. The lower minutes are designed specifically to give Bryant a higher probability of making that late-game 17-foot shot this time around.

Since running himself into the ground and reemerging as a point guard rather than a shooting guard, Bryant has the Lakers playing team basketball on the offensive end, and that energy is also transferring over to the defensive side of the ball.

Entering Wednesday's cross-town rivalry game, the Lakers have held their opponents under 100 points in consecutive games. That's a first for the 2014-15 Lakers, who give up 108.1 points per game on average.

The Clippers have won eight of the last nine head-to-head meetings, so the Lakers would probably prefer not to call this a rivalry game seeing as the purple and gold have not been at all competitive recently. Famously, Scott's first rivalry game at the helm featured the coach saying the Lakers did not consider the Clippers to be rivals because the only rivalry that mattered had to do with championship banners.

All the same, the most painfully one-sided of these non-rivalry games was a 48-point demolition the Clippers handed out on the Lakers' home court back in March of 2014.

The Lakers' lone victory over the past two seasons came on Opening Night of the 2013-14 NBA season. Bryant's Achilles was still recovering back then, and Xavier Henry led an energetic bench attack that hit the Clippers with a surprise knockout punch.

Ranked fourth from the bottom in the NBA, the Lakers have not had a season worth remembering. In a similar sense, the Clippers remain in the playoff picture, but the first 35 games have not gone as planned for Clippers coach Doc Rivers. The Clippers' winning percentage is down from a season ago, and the top seed in the conference already appears out of reach.

The Golden State Warriors hold that top spot in the NBA, and surprisingly, one of the Lakers' 11 wins came against the league's best team. Continuing with that thought, the Lakers have beaten five of the top 11 teams in the NBA. Seemingly, the tougher opposition brings out the best in these Lakers.

Case in point, the Lakers nearly pulled off a shock victory in Portland on Monday night despite missing two starters for the entire game and losing a third starter to a broken nose before the fourth quarter started. Somehow, the Lakers still hung around until the final minute against the second best team in the conference.

Had Bryant been available down the stretch, the Lakers probably manage to hold on in Portland. Instead, Bryant stayed home to rest for Wednesday's rivalry game. At 7:30 p.m. Pacific Time, a well-rested Bryant will lead the Lakers against the Clippers at Staples Center. And yes, it is a rivalry game.