The first time you blow a big lead when you have a chance to clinch a play­off series … OK, it’s an aberration.

The sec­ond time? Ah, these things happen.

The third time? I think it’s fair to say you’re in trouble.

So this is what the Clip­pers face Tues­day night, in a Game 7 they didn’t expect but maybe should have. They will face a Den­ver Nuggets team that has been through this drill often enough that it seems imper­vi­ous to nerves, or anx­i­ety, or even wor­ry. Den­ver won three straight in the last round to elim­i­nate Utah. In 2019, they advanced to two Game 7’s, beat­ing San Anto­nio in the first round and los­ing to Port­land in the second.

They’re a young team, in an ear­li­er stage of devel­op­ment. But they may have more play­off expe­ri­ence as a unit than the group the Clip­pers brought togeth­er with an NBA cham­pi­onship in mind.

“We don’t care. We’re just going to go there and have fun,” said the Nuggets’ ver­sa­tile 7‑foot All-Star, Niko­la Jokic, after Den­ver wiped out an 18-point sec­ond-half deficit in just under nine min­utes and won going away Sun­day, 111–98.

“Coach (Michael Mal­one) said before in the meet­ing, just don’t for­get to have fun. And then the third and fourth quar­ter, we were hav­ing fun togeth­er and every­one – you see every­body laugh­ing. Every­body was feel­ing good because we were play­ing good. We were play­ing amaz­ing. So when we play like that, con­fi­dence is real­ly high.”

Espe­cial­ly when they’ve done it before. They seem poised to do to the Clip­pers what they did to the Jazz in the last round, and even more so. In Friday’s Game 5 Los Ange­les blew a 16-point sec­ond-half lead.

And go back to the last round, and the 21-point lead the Clip­pers spit up against Dal­las. And sud­den­ly it becomes clear that we were way too con­fi­dent about that Hall­way Series that we’ve been hyp­ing up ever since that news con­fer­ence in July, 2019, when Paul George and Kawhi Leonard sat on an ele­men­tary school stage in South L.A. while Clip­pers’ own­er Steve Ballmer talked about bring­ing “the Lar­ry O’B” to L.A.

Yes, and today Lak­ers fans are smil­ing and nod­ding. Their team took care of busi­ness in Game 5. If they feel com­pelled to respond to this devel­op­ment with snark … nah, Lak­er fans wouldn’t do that, would they?

(Pause for a humil­i­ty check: The last time the Lak­ers and Clip­pers had a chance to meet in a play­off series, some­body blew a 3–1 series lead to spoil it. It was the Lak­ers, los­ing to Mike D’Antoni’s Phoenix Suns in 2006 at the height of Kobe Bryant’s powers.)

The issue right now is that the Clip­pers find them­selves faced with a supreme­ly con­fi­dent oppo­nent for whom no deficit is too big, no sit­u­a­tion too dire.

And let’s not for­get that Den­ver was the third seed in the West, and that they were only one game behind the Clip­pers for the No. 2 spot when the nov­el coro­n­avirus shut every­thing down in March.

“We start­ed off train­ing camp back in Sep­tem­ber (of 2019) in Col­orado Springs talk­ing about win­ning a cham­pi­onship,” Mal­one said. “And we still have those same goals. We’ve nev­er lost sight of that. Four months dur­ing the hia­tus, com­ing back into the bub­ble, try­ing to get healthy … we’ve always felt that we were good enough. No one else does. But we don’t care about that. We don’t lis­ten to the noise.

“We’ve always had this inter­nal belief in our­selves as a col­lec­tive group that we’re good enough to win a cham­pi­onship. And we find it fun­ny that the nar­ra­tive is like, ‘Oh, the Nuggets are a cute team. Oh, what a good sto­ry.’ We were sec­ond in the West last year. We were one pos­ses­sion away from going to the West­ern Con­fer­ence finals. Most of this year we’re the No. 2 seed in the West … So I think it comes down to just a tremen­dous belief and con­fi­dence in who we are, what we’re about and what we’re try­ing to accomplish.”

So the Clip­pers are up against a team that not only is resilient, deter­mined and skilled – wit­ness those one-legged step-back three-point­ers Jokic drained Sun­day – but has a chip on its shoul­der from lis­ten­ing to all of those folks, nation­al­ly as well as local­ly, pre­dict­ing an L.A. vs. L.A. West­ern Con­fer­ence final.

“All the media counts us out every­where, all the time,” Jamal Mur­ray said. “So it’s nice to see every­body eat their words.”

(Yeah, I know. Guilty as charged. But hold the mus­tard and rel­ish until we see what hap­pens in Game 7.)

What­ev­er moti­va­tion­al mag­ic Doc Rivers has left, he may want to bring it hard.

“It’s frus­trat­ing,” he said Sun­day after­noon. “But lis­ten, when you decide to become a coach, it’s not going to be ros­es every day. So we clear­ly have the right for­mu­la as far as how we’re play­ing, and then we lose it.

” … I caught it ear­ly, though, even before we lost the lead. I turned to Ty (Lue) and said we lost our pace. We’re walk­ing the ball up the floor. We were get­ting stops ear­ly in the third quar­ter and we just lost our pace, and that’s just not us. We can’t play the way we tried to play.”

So what will his mes­sage to his play­ers be Tues­day night?

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”

It had bet­ter be good.

jalexander@scng.com

@Jim_Alexander on Twitter