The Los Angeles Lakers hosted the Denver Nuggets on Saturday night in Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals. After dropping two winnable games in Denver, Los Angeles absolutely had to win this game to have any chance of winning the series.
Instead, the Lakers dropped another game that could have been swung the other way if the team simply executed. Now, the Lake Show is down 3-0 against the best team in the league. Los Angeles would need to pull off something that has never been done in NBA history to win this series.
Nothing is impossible but it is hard to blame any Lakers fan for waiving the white flag after Saturday night, especially considering how the team lost. When the dust settled, it was LA’s foundational weakness that has followed the team all season that lost them this game (and the series).
Lakers’ inability to hit three-point shots led to heartbreaking Game 3 loss vs Nuggets.
At the end of the day, this is a three-point shooting league and that came back to bite the Lakers in this game (as well as Game 2). Denver is not even a prolific three-point shooting team but the Lakers were unable to hold their end of the bargain to keep up in this game.
Los Angeles finished the night shooting 10-32 (31.3%) from three but most of the woes came in the fourth quarter. With the game still in the balance in the fourth quarter, the purple and gold shot 2-9 from beyond the arc, allowing Denver to take and slowly extend the lead.
This was the foundational weakness that fans were worried about when the season started. The team added shooters to address that problem during the deadline but in the fourth quarter of this game, they were nowhere to be found.
Malik Beasley has been played out of the playoff rotation because he could not hit a shot and offers nothing on the defensive end. Meanwhile, D’Angelo Russell proved to be too big of a liability both with his defense and offensive decision-making that Darvin Ham had to sit him down for all of crunch time.
What’s left is Austin Reaves (who went 1-1 from three in the fourth quarter) and a collection of sub-standard three-point shooters. And that is exactly what fans watched on Saturday night. Los Angeles continued to settle for shots, missed said shots, and allowed the fans in attendance to leave early to miss traffic.