Blake Griffin believes Los Angeles Clippers ‘ran out of time’

The Los Angeles Clippers enjoyed a fantastic season. [related-category

They finished with a record of 57-25, the third best mark in all of basketball. They defeated the Golden State Warriors in seven games in the first round before falling to the Oklahoma City Thunder in six games in the conference semifinals.

In fact, the Clippers became so confident as the playoffs progress, star power forward Blake Griffin told head coach and president Doc Rivers, the team finally figured out how to be at their best and they simply “ran out of time.”

“Blake said it exactly right after the season, when he said he felt like he figured out what Clipper basketball was during the playoffs,” Rivers said via Sean Deveney of Sporting News. “We ran out of time, he just started to get it. That’s how I felt, like, even though we won a lot of games, we never felt like we had it. Then all (of a) sudden in the playoffs, more in the Oklahoma series, as crazy as that sounds, that is when you could see us start to become the team we knew we could become, and it just felt like we ran out of time, getting it right.”

Griffin was fantastic for the Clippers last season, looking like a legitimate MVP candidate, carrying the team while star point guard Chris Paul was out with an injury. On the season, he averaged 24.1 points, 9.5 rebounds, 3.9 assists and 1.2 steals per game while shooting 52.8% from the field, 27.3% from beyond the arc and 71.5% from the charity stripe.