James Harden confident surging Clippers can fight their way back to contention after ugly start to season

The Los Angeles Clippers have managed to right the ship after a miserable 6-21 start to the season. After a 119-105 win over the Washington Wizards, on Wednesday night, the Clippers have won 11 of 13, including four straight, and are just a half-game back of the 10th place Memphis Grizzlies for the last play-in spot at 17-23. 

A Clippers team that was showing its age through the first six weeks of the season seems to have figured things out over the last month. In the win against the Wizards, Kawhi Leonard and James Harden combined for 55 points, as the pair continues to pull their team out of a deep hole. While they're still not where many expected them to be in the standings, Harden's confidence in his team hasn't wavered.

"Some teams, when it gets that bad, they just let the wheels fall off," Harden said, via ESPN. "I had interviews where people were asking me, 'How do you find confidence?' and I'm like, 'The confidence is there. The losses are frustrating, but the confidence is still there.' I think finding little tweaks and being a lot better defensively is what really helped us out. ... Now we got to take one game at a time, just like when we were in the hole. We can come all the way back, but we have to chip away, chip away and really build some momentum going into the All-Star break."

The improvement from L.A.'s defense has been night and day. The Clippers went from having the 25th-ranked defense and giving up 119.4 points per game, to the 13th-ranked defense that is now only allowing 113.9 points. It may seem like a small shift, but those few points can really decide the outcomes of games. And given that the Clippers have just a 4-10 record in their 14 clutch games, a better level of defense could have really made a big difference.

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The offense, though, has seen a massive spark in the last month and a half. L.A. has the fifth-best offense in the league during that span, a significant improvement from ranking 20th through the first month of the season. That's thanks to Leonard not only being healthy after missing several weeks in November, but he's performing at a level offensively that we haven't seen in quite some time. Leonard is averaging 28.2 points on the season, which is a career high, as you can tell he's doing everything he can offensively to will his team to wins. 

The same goes for Harden, who is having his best scoring output since he was an MVP finalist during the 2019-20 season. His efficiency isn't ideal at just 42.5%, but his 8.7 assists over the last month ranks fifth in the league.

The combination of those two All-Stars has been the key to the Clippers' turnaround.

"We talk probably more than anybody," Harden said of his relationship with Leonard. "Once I see him flip the switch, it was like, 'OK, yeah, it's time to go.' That's the Kawhi we need. My job is just facilitate, get him going, get us going. So it's just been a complete 180."

The Clippers still have a long way to climb up the standings before they can put this bad start fully in the rear-view mirror, but an easier stretch of games is ahead with matchups against the Wizards, Chicago Bulls, Brooklyn Nets and Utah Jazz in the next two weeks. They could stack enough wins to firmly be in play-in positioning ahead of the All-Star break, and then use that momentum to make another push once the season restarts in mid-February.

It won't be easy, but the Clippers have shown recently that they're not going to wave the white flag on the season.