LOS ANGELES, Dec. 21 (Ticker) -- Minus two starters and their sixth man, the Los Angeles Clippers still had enough offense to defeat the lowly Denver Nuggets.

NBA TV highlights from Nuggets-Clippers: 56k | 300k

Rookie Marco Jaric scored 22 points and Michael Olowokandi contributed 18 as the Clippers handed the Nuggets their eighth straight defeat, 92-89.

"A thing that makes makes angry (is) when I see people who don't expect (me to be) the kind of player I think I am," said Jaric, a point guard who was forced to play shooting guard because of the Clippers' shortage of healthy players. "I believe in myself and how good I can become."

Tremaine Fowlkes added a career-high 16 points for Los Angeles, which was missing injured starters Elton Brand and Eric Piatkowski and key reserve Quentin Richardson.

"If we get all those guys back, we've got to incorporate them back into the team against," Clippers coach Alvin Gentry said. "I just want us to get healthy so we can have some kind of consistent rotation."

"I had to prepare mentally and step up to the challenge," said Fowlkes, who played 46 minutes. "I practice hard for these games and it's not out of the ordinary for me to be prepared to play this many minutes. It was very nice to get the minutes."

The Clippers reeled off the final 11 points of the third quarter to take a 73-69 lead, then scored the first four in the final period.

They extended their advantage to 88-76 on a jump hook by Olowokandi with 3:47 to play, then did just just enough to hang on down the stretch and complete a 2-2 homestand. It was Los Angeles' fifth straight home victory over Denver.

"They are a very good defensive team and it was important to run our offense on them," Olowokandi said. "In our practices we discussed that we had to execute our offense. Everybody on the team played well today."

Denver took its biggest lead, 50-40, on a layup by Predrag Savovic with 3:51 left in the first half, but Los Angeles rallied to tie the game at the half, 52-52.

"I thought the run that really hurt us was the 12-2 run at the end of the first half and there was another run in the second half," Denver coach Jeff Bzdelik said. "Those kinds of runs are caused by our inability offensively to execute under duress and we fell to their pressure."

Juwan Howard scored a season-high 30 points for the Nuggets, who have lost 13 of 14. They had not dropped eight straight contests since a 16-game skid from February 12-March 10, 1998.

Denver narrowly outshot Los Angeles, 46 percent to 45 percent, but the Clippers made four more 3-pointers and 15 more free throws.

"They're a real hard team to play," Gentry said. "The one thing that they do is play extremely hard. This is a team that held Dallas to 80 points. We knew that it was going to be a tough game and that they were going to have runs. The bottom line is that we came away with a win, and right now that's the most important thing for us."