Los Angeles Lakers desperately need to solve their shooting dilemma
The Los Angeles Lakers have a fatal flaw – they can’t shoot.
In what should’ve been a surprise to no one, the Los Angeles Lakers dropped their opening night contest against the defending champion Golden State Warriors. That was widely expected. Though, there was one concerning trend that began to shape for the Lakers – their inability to shoot.
During the offseason, there were questions if the Lakers had done enough to solve their shooting issues. Last season, the Lakers were bottom third in the league in 3-point shooting. Through one game, it appears Los Angeles hasn’t exactly fixed that.
The Los Angeles Lakers need to fix their shooting, somehow
Against the Warriors, the Lakers shot 10-40 from 3. That comes out to 25 percent. If you want, you can chalk it up to a bad shooting night from Los Angeles, but I’m not sure there’s any shooter on the team that you can really lean on.
The Lakers don’t have “shooter” they can rely on currently on the roster. And that’s a problem. In fact, there could be an argument made that the best shooter in the rotation may very well be LeBron James. That’s not great. You want to surround LeBron with shooters, not have LeBron be your best shooter.
Again, it’s one game. It’s easy to overreact to one result and one performance. I suppose it is encouraging that the biggest talking point from the Lakers’ first game wasn’t the play of Russell Westbrook.
But if the Lakers are going to change the narrative on their potential this season, they’re going to have to change the narrative on their shooting.
Even though this is probably something the Lakers should’ve addressed during the offseason, we all know that one avenue remains for the team to fix this issue. The question is, do they want to go down that road this early in the season?
LeBron and Anthony Davis combined to score 58 points. That’s generally good enough for the Lakers to be competitive in any game, against any team. They lost by 14 to the Warriors and were outscored by 18 points from the 3-point line.
Next. Philadelphia 76ers: 3 big overreactions from an opening night loss. dark
There are many things teams can overcome – bad defense, inconsistent offense, and bad coaching. But one of the things that are almost impossible to win through is bad shooting. And right now, it appears the Lakers can’t do that.