Man, how do you win the jump ball with the 5 seconds left with a chance to tie or win the game and then not even recover the ball because you hit it way too hard? The Clippers got free throws out of it, and that was the game. I don’t blame Troy Daniels for not knowing the deepest intricacies of jump ball strategy; I blame Kokoskov for not arranging the other dudes well enough around the jump ball. There’s an art to that.
It could be that they didn’t want the ball because they are tanking. That second part is definitely true by this point in the season, but I still think that they probably wanted to win this game. They came SO CLOSE. De’Anthony Melton was clutch at the end of regulation, and then not clutch at all at the end of overtime. He was just one among many Suns scrubbums (for those unfamiliar with the term, a “scrubbum” is a combination scrub/bum) who stepped up.
Mikal Bridges was one of those. He had a career-high 19 against defenders who didn’t realize he could hit such tough threes. That one-dribble pull-up, if I were a Clippers fan and they ended up losing, that would’ve been the shot I would’ve been pissed about the whole night. There’s something about those kind of shots that is infuriating at a level way beyond the usual.