WASHINGTON _ The Los Angeles Clippers' porous defense began to spring enormous leaks in the decisive fourth quarter, the holes opening far too wide for them plug on a night they faced Washington shooting guard Bradley Beal, who punctured them all game long.
Offering so little resistance pushed the Clippers to a 117-110 defeat by the Wizards on Sunday afternoon at the Verizon Center.
Beal riddled the Clippers with 41 points, one shy of tying his career high.
The Wizards shot 53.1 percent from the field, 52.5 percent from three-point range. But it was the fourth quarter that was the most telling.
A halfhearted defensive effort by the Clippers resulted in the Wizards shooting 80 percent from the field in the final 12 minutes.
The Wizards were 12 of 15 from the field in the fourth, and they scored 32 points seemingly at will, snapping the Clippers' four-game winning streak in the process.
"I think us as a team, we've got to talk about it because we've lost confidence in our defense," Chris Paul, who had 13 points and 12 assists, said. "And I think a lot of that starts with me, being on the ball. But no way should we have lost this game."
The Clippers had put themselves in position to earn the win by building an 11-point lead in the third.
But Beal became a force the Clippers were unable to contain.
By the time Beal was done scoring 18 points in the third, the Clippers' lead was down to two points at the end of the quarter.
"Our defense was not our defense today," said DeAndre Jordan, the Clippers' defensive savant.
"Brad (Beal) was on fire. I can't take anything away from him. He's a hell of a basketball player. We weren't physical with him at all. He created a lot of the contact and initiated the physicality tonight and got a lot of open shots the way he wanted to get his shots. But that's on all of us."
Still, with the Clippers going back on the attack in the fourth, they built a seven-point lead midway through that quarter.
Then Markieff Morris went on the attack against the Clippers' relenting defense, scoring 12 of his 23 points in the fourth.
By the time the Wizards had taken a six-point lead late in the game, Clippers coach Doc Rivers argued too vehemently and was ejected after back-to-back technical fouls with one minute, six seconds left.
So now a Clippers team that once had an NBA-best 14-2 record has fallen to fourth in the Western Conference behind Golden State, San Antonio and Houston.
And it's all because of a defense that has been lost somewhere.
"I don't know if it's fatigued or if it's just a lack of communication, but we're just not sort of anticipating that next action, the next thing," J.J. Redick said. "If you are going to be a top-five defense like we aspire to be, you have to all sort of be linked and everybody doing the same thing and having each other's back."
