There are a number of factors the Los Angeles Lakers can point to for their buzzer-beating loss to the Dallas Mavericks on Friday night, but one of them is the 3-point line.
The Mavericks outscored the Lakers by 33 points from beyond the arc, which is tough to overcome even though L.A. played a quality game otherwise.
Dallas simply could not miss, draining 16 of 34 attempts from deep, including the game-winner at the buzzer by Max Kleber. The Lakers, on the other hand, had a horrific shooting night, making just five of their 20 attempts.
Shooting has been a struggle all year for the Lakers, although they have had some outbursts from deep that have led to key wins such as over the New Orleans Pelicans this past week.
When discussing the Lakers’ 3-point shooting woes after the game, Austin Reaves actually stated that he believes they need to shoot more and explained why.
“I think it’s just the nature of the game,” Reaves said. “You make shots, you miss shots obviously. You always want to make shots but that’s not the case. 25% is obviously not good. I think we as a team need to shoot more 3s. Twenty is ehh, but that’s the game today. So I think we need to get a little more up. I think we got guys that can shoot the ball so once we see one go through the net, like we saw Beas hit one, it brings energy. And then Troy hit one, and it’s just a trickle-down effect.
“That’s where I thought that in New Orleans, it kind of got everybody going early. But it’s the nature of the game. We want people to be aggressive shooting the ball but even if you’re not shooting it great at the moment, just keep shooting and we have confidence in that.”
As a team, the Lakers rank 24th out of 30 teams at 31.3 attempts from deep a game while ranking 28th in percentage at 33.9 percent. A lot of that is due to the Lakers’ roster before the trade deadline when they had no shooting, however.
Now, the Lakers have guys like Malik Beasley and D’Angelo Russell along with Reaves and Troy Brown Jr. that can knock down outside shots.
While the Lakers shouldn’t get too 3-point happy, it is tough to win a game when you’re only making five shots from deep and the other team is making 16. Perhaps Reaves is right that they can build some momentum by making shots as they did in the New Orleans game, so at this point, it’s worth a shot to get the Lakers back on track.
Davis shoulders blame for ‘tough’ loss to Mavericks
Anthony Davis played a big role in the Lakers’ loss to the Mavericks with some late-game miscues. He said afterward that he took the blame for what was a really tough loss.
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