NEW ORLEANS -- There will be nights during the Los Angeles Clippers' current eight-game road trip that their best will simply not be enough.

Maybe it will be due to physical fatigue, mental fatigue or simply facing a team that's just better than them. The Clippers understood they probably weren't going to go 8-0 on their "Grammy road trip."

What they didn't and really shouldn't account for is simply not coming out and playing hard enough. Not in the second game of the road trip, and not against a New Orleans Pelicans team that is on the outside looking into the playoff hunt. These are the kind of wins the Clippers have to put in the bank, and on Friday they simply couldn't do it.

The Clippers saw their six-game winning streak snapped in New Orleans, 108-103, by a Pelicans team playing without Anthony Davis but with far more energy than the Clippers. New Orleans was up by as many as 14 points in the fourth quarter and L.A. was able to come back and cut it to two before fading away. The final result was the only justifiable outcome, according to Doc Rivers.

"We didn't play hard enough, honestly," Rivers said. "Listen, I wanted to win the game and you want to win games, but sometimes the basketball gods say that you shouldn't win the game, and I thought tonight was one of those nights. We didn't have great focus tonight and we've been pretty good, so it happens, but our focus was just terrible tonight. I don't know if they found out A.D. [Anthony Davis] wasn't playing or not, but that's not how you have to approach a game."

The Clippers were actually leading at the half, 54-53, before the Pelicans hit three 3-pointers to start the third quarter and went on an 11-2 run to take command of the game.

"You think about the beginning of the third quarter and if I don't call a timeout I think they score the rest of the game, so it happens," Rivers said. "I'm not happy with it and our guys shouldn't be happy with themselves. We played awful and we deserved to lose. Really if we had won the game it would have been an injustice; it really would have been. We deserved to lose the game."

Rivers was particularly disappointed in the Clippers' effort went it came to 50-50 balls and effort on the glass, as they were outrebounded 51-38.

"I don't know what the 50-50 count was but it had to be a 1,000 to zero," Rivers said. "They got every loose ball and that means they were more focused, they were more into the game, they were more activated, and our guys just thought if we showed up tonight the game would take care of itself, and it didn't."

Whenever the Clippers lose, you can usually look at their defense and Friday was no different. They scored 103 points, which is below their average of 107, but they're not going to win many games when they allow a team to hit 13 of 25 3-pointers (52 percent) and score 35 points in the third quarter alone.

"We couldn't get stops tonight," Chris Paul said. "We didn't get stops when we needed to. They got in the lane; they were comfortable all night long. Bad loss for us, but we've got to get back on the horse tomorrow."

The Clippers had found ways to come back and win games in the fourth quarter during their six-game winning streak, but coming back from double-digit deficits late is never going to be a good recipe for consistent success, and certainly not on the road.

"They pushed us around and they played how they wanted to play, and we just came out and didn't play with any energy, didn't play with any passion," Blake Griffin said. "We were just bad all-around."

It doesn't get any easier for the Clippers, as they will face the San Antonio Spurs on Saturday. They will then travel to New York to play Brooklyn before closing out the road trip with four games in five nights against Cleveland, Toronto, Oklahoma City and Dallas -- all playoff teams.

"We need a big bounce-back tomorrow," Griffin said. "If we come out and play like that against San Antonio, we're going to get run out of the gym, so we better find it. It's on us as players and on me; I need to do a better job. You can't have these type of games when we're about to play four in five and [against] all these playoff teams. We better figure it out."