HOUSTON -- There's no skip-ahead-30-seconds button in the NBA. No fast-forwarding, no AP-testing your way out of a college class. The Los Angeles Clippers still have some learning to do to join the playoff elite, and they'll have to grind their way through at least another 48 minutes of basketball rather than relax and await the winner of Memphis-Golden State.

A 124-103 loss to the Rockets on Tuesday night means the Clippers were denied their closeout attempt for their first trip to the conference finals since the team's inception. There's still a "never" in the Clippers' franchise history because there's still a "never" that belongs to this group in particular.

Since Chris Paul joined the team in 2011, the Clippers have never won a series in fewer than seven games, going the distance to beat Memphis in 2012, the Warriors in 2014 and the Spurs in the first round this season. They were up 3-1 in 2012 and 3-2 in 2013 but needed to rally from down 3-2 to beat the Spurs this year.

Closing series is the graduate-level coursework of the NBA. We see rising teams struggle with it often. Doc Rivers' 2008 champion Boston Celtics lost their first two closeout chances and three of five overall. The 2000 Lakers were 2-6 in early closeout games. (Once those Lakers got it, they got it. They were 7-0 in closeout games the next two years of the three-peat.)

The typical road-closeout formula goes like this: absorb the team's last act of desperation in the first quarter, then slowly squeeze them so deeply into submission that the prospect of coming back just to extend the inevitable doesn't seem worth the effort. The Clippers did the opposite. They subverted a shaky start by the Rockets -- including Dwight Howard's first foul 20 seconds into the game -- with dreadful shooting. The Clippers shot 30 percent in the first quarter, 2-for-11 on 3-pointers. They fell behind and stayed behind, Houston's confidence growing with every possession.

"We missed so many easy shots in the first quarter, I think that affected our defense," Matt Barnes said. "And then I think after that we didn't really trust each other on either end."

There weren't many tactical reasons for the turnaround from the weekend, when the Clippers held 30-point leads in both games. Houston coach Kevin McHale inserted Josh Smith into the starting lineup, and Smith was more productive, but that's not really the story.

"I just thought we had more juice," McHale said.

Juice, oomph, urgency. Whatever you want to call it, the Rockets had it and the Clippers lacked it.

So now this series is prolonged. That's the only way to describe it. An extra game doesn't feel like a gift, as Game 7 of the Clippers' first-round series with the Spurs was. This is more like a flight delay.

It would be easier to be excited about the prospect of another game if it didn't carry with it the likelihood of more trips to the foul line by two of the league's worst free throw shooters, Dwight Howard and DeAndre Jordan. We got through most of Game 5 without the gimmicky fouling away from the ball, but both coaches turned to it in the second half. McHale adhered to the notion that the best time to employ the "tactic" is when leading. Rivers did it out of desperation.

The result was a second half that took an hour and 15 minutes, including a 39-minute fourth quarter in which the teams combined to shoot 25 free throws. Tell me again how this is good for basketball? Explain why it's so critical that Howard and Jordan master free throws, but we don't ask a Dahntay Jones to do have any statistical impact other than commit three fouls in two minutes? This is how people think they are promoting the development of basketball fundamentals?

Jones is still not the standard for fouling efficiency in this series; Houston's Kostas Papanikolaou committed four fouls in one minute during the first half of Game 4. For those whose greatest fear is that eliminating the hacking loophole would make it acceptable to be a bad free throw shooter (which it wouldn't, by the way), how about the idea that keeping the gimmick creates an opportunity to play in an NBA game while utilizing no skills at all?

Now the Clippers have another chance to continue their learning curve of these playoffs, another chance to show that they're ready to close.

But with the knowledge that they don't absolutely need to win Game 6 to win the series, what's to keep them from slacking off again?

"You look at, statistically, Game 7s on the road," Blake Griffin said. "Nobody wants to put themselves in that position. If we don't have a sense of urgency going home after already losing a game, then we'll be in trouble. But we'll be all right."

Home teams win 80 percent of Game 7s in the NBA. The Clippers might not know how to close yet, but they know they want to stay on the right side of the math. They have one more chance to live up to the even higher probability: Teams that take a 3-1 lead in an NBA playoff series go on to win the series 96 percent of the time. League history is on their side, even if their own past isn't.