Are Clippers ready? Yes and no

— Ready? Yes and no
Rivers said he and his team are prepared for the start of the season yet there remained a couple of questions he faced. One he couldn’t answer – yet – and the other he was as definitive as he could be.
First, does he have any concerns after training camp?
“You know, I don’t know – and that’s a concern,” he said with a little smile. “Because I don’t know the team yet. I know them as far as I know them over the last month.
“I look at our team and I see our athleticism. We spent a lot of time in preseason trying to teach spacing. Now we want to put it all together and go to the post a lot more and keep spacing. But I don’t know how we’re going to react yet under duress.. And we will be under duress in a lot of games.”
At the end of eight preseason games, Rivers noted his team had taken a step or two back on the defensive end but when the curtain rises, he expects the Clippers’ focus to snap back into place.
“Yeah, I do. It doesn’t mean you play great defense but I think they’ll give us the great defensive try, I’ll guarantee you that,” he said. “Our guys know our defense now. We can always get better at it and better at it because that’s trust.
“Defense is trust as much as anything and you don’t just walk into camp and say, ‘OK guys, do this and you have trust.’ That comes through the fire. But I think we know it and that’s the first part.