Trey Murphy likes to refer to Brandon Ingram as his twin.
Both are tall forwards from North Carolina with sweet shooting strokes. Although they are not blood relatives, their connection Saturday was strong.
Murphy converted 10 3-pointers. Ingram assisted on six of them. Those two combined to score 64 points in the New Orleans Pelicans’ 131-110 win over the Los Angeles Clippers at Crypto.com Arena.
The surging Murphy scorched the Clippers with his outside shooting on his way to 32 points. He was one 3-point make shy of the Pelicans’ single-game record of 11, which CJ McCollum set in December.
“Trey shot the cover off the ball tonight,” Pelicans coach Willie Green said. “It was good to see him make shot after shot after shot. He’s capable. Our team is capable. That’s the standard we want him to play.”
Ingram, who recorded the first triple-double of his career Thursday, played another masterful all-around game. He scored 32 points and handed out 13 assists.
The Pelicans have won four games in a row. They are 37-37, which puts them in a three-way tie with the Minnesota Timberwolves and Los Angeles Lakers for seventh place in the West. There are only eight regular-season games remaining in New Orleans’ season.
The Pelicans have been one of the West’s worst road teams this season. They came into Saturday’s game with the fourth-worst road record in their conference. Yet right away, the Pelicans attacked the Clippers, knocking Kawhi Leonard’s team back on its heels.
An Ingram pull-up midway through the first quarter gave the Pelicans a 10-point lead. They buried the Clippers under a barrage of long-range makes. The Pelicans hit nine 3-pointers in the first quarter, and they had 14 makes from behind the arc in the first half.
New Orleans took a 12-point lead into halftime. Murphy ensured his team didn’t remove its foot from the accelerator after the break. Murphy scored New Orleans’ first basket of the second half, a long-range bomb from 26 feet.
Murphy hit three more 3-pointers in the fourth quarter to give him a new career-high in 3-point makes.
The Pelicans led by as many as 25 points. They never trailed. They kept Leonard in check throughout the game, limiting him to 12 points on 4-of-16 shooting. Herb Jones made life difficult for the Clippers’ high-scoring forward. Jones got whacked in the head by Eric Gordon in the first half. His left eye was swollen, but he stayed in the game and continued to wreak havoc defensively.
“Herb is a leader,” Green said. “I’ll continue to say it: It’s a blessing to have him. First one there. Last one to leave. He’s defending the best players night in and night out. He could have easily decided he was done. He looks at me with one eye and says, ‘Coach, I’m playing.’ It’s great to have that type of character in the locker room.”
The Pelicans have struggled since Zion Williamson got hurt in their first game of 2023, but there are signs they could be turning a corner. They had one of their best performances of the season in Saturday’s win. The 21 3s they hit were one away from a franchise record.
Their best shooting night of the season could not have come at a better time.
“This is a business trip for us,” Green said. “We understand what’s at stake. We’re working diligently. But we have a work-man like mentality. Come in. Keep chopping wood.”
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