But, Lamb and Jones both played ‘meaningful’ minutes early in the season, and both looked like the classic deer in headlights. They’re getting better, but taking off the waders doesn’t mean they’re ready for the shark-invested side of the pool just yet. Soon enough, and maybe sooner than we think. But probably not just yet.

Lamb, especially, I’m hoping to see more court time. But only if he’s ready for it. With the playoffs right around the corner, not sure this is the time to be experimenting with players that may or may not be ready. Especially with a loaded team like OKC.

The thing is, no matter which way they go, more playing time for the youngsters or not more, it will be viewed as the “wrong” decision by a lot of fans, unless they win a title. They win, all is forgiven. They get beat on a last-second shot in Game 7 of the Finals, nothing else will matter for some folks.

”It was a good road win for us in a playoff-type atmosphere,” said Westbrook, who had 29 points and 10 assists. ”We did a good job of keeping their crowd out of the game.”

”We weren’t in a panic mode,” Westbrook said. ”We just wanted to win.”

The referees were busy for much of the day, with the Clippers called for 26 fouls to the Thunder’s 22 in a physical game that featured double technicals on Caron Butler and Kendrick Perkins for their verbal exchange and Ibaka’s flagrant-1 foul on Griffin.

”It’s always going to be a tough, chippy game any time we play them because we’re both pretty physical teams with physical bigs, so there’s a lot of pushing and all that down low,” Griffin said. ”I guess it’s tough to officiate and know what to call and what not to, but they seemed to know today what to call.”

”That’s embarrassing. That’s crazy. That’s not like us,” Paul said. ”In the first half, they just did a good job of mucking the lane up. Every time I came down court, I saw a wall. They basically trapped me into ball screens. In the second half, we brought L.O. in and we went small, which opened the court up. And once we opened the court up, we could get into the lane and make plays and fire up shots.”

”There’s no such thing as moral victories to us,” Griffin said. ”We’ve been in this situation before, but we don’t want to put ourselves in that situation. We’ve got to be better from start to finish to beat a team like this.”

Brooks credited Westbrook for instilling calm in the late going.

”His leadership is getting better year by year and it should be,” he said. ”Tonight was a classic example of what he’s done. He’s an emotional guy, but he keeps everything together.”

By BETH HARRIS (AP Sports Writer)

I usually go along with about every thing Coach does but not with the handling of Jeremy. He could help in my opinion.
Rick