The Los Angeles Clippers survived a scare on Saturday night, escaping Dallas with an overtime win that pushed their record to 35-36. It was the kind of game that shouldn't have gone to overtime, and that's exactly the problem Ty Lue is trying to solve.

The Clippers have enough talent to beat teams like the Mavericks in regulation. The question is whether they have the discipline to actually do it consistently.

Inconsistency is simply the Clippers' biggest enemy at this point. The hallmark of an inconsistent team is one that occasionally puts it all together but can't seem to do it on a nightly basis. That's precisely why LA, after all the winning, still finds itself in the play-in range. 

The overtime win over Dallas bought them another day, but it also exposed the same issue that's haunted this team all season. Lue addressed it directly after the game, and his words weren't sugarcoated.

"We've got to be better," Lue said after the win. "That first unit, like JVG said at halftime, we've got to have a defensive identity. With that first unit, we've got to understand what we're trying to do."

That's a pretty big callout. Lue knows that this team has tremendous defensive potential, and he's well aware that getting back to having that as a core part of their identity will lead to this group having a chance to reach its ceiling. 

"It's got to be 48 minutes, and that's who we have to be," he said. "When we're turning teams over, when we're guarding teams and rebounding the basketball, that's when we're at our best offensively as well."

That's a coach being honest in a moment when it would've been easy to just celebrate the win. Lue isn't interested in moral victories, and he's not going to let a lucky overtime escape mask what actually happened in that game. The first unit was a problem, and he's not in the business of sugarcoating anything. 

The connection he draws between defense and offense is worth paying attention to. It's obvious why defensive effort generates the energy and transition opportunities that make the Clippers offense actually function. It's a systems argument disguised as a motivational quote.

The last few weeks of the regular season will tell the real story of this Clippers season. If they can clean up the defensive lapses Lue identified and bring that 48-minute effort he's asking for, they've got a real shot at making some noise in the playoffs and maybe even upsetting a high-seeded team. 

But if LA keeps letting games bleed into overtime against teams they should handle, the season will slip away quietly. That huge turnaround could still be all for naught if some things don't change. 

Lue's been around long enough to know the difference between a team that figures it out and a team that almost does. Right now the Clippers are standing at that exact crossroads.