Anthony Davis grabbed the ball after it swished through the net and slammed his head against it in frustration.
The Lakers had been fighting, once again without LeBron James, who remained away from the team while nursing a sore foot. They traveled to Minnesota, where they had just played one of their worst offensive games in years, and it was happening again.
The shots wouldn’t fall, the Lakers couldn’t score and, to make matters worse, Davis had turned it over again — the ball simply squirting out of his hands, leading to a Minnesota three.
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The basketball deserved to be punished.
No matter how much the Lakers defended, no matter how often they climbed back into a game they never led, the basketball just wouldn’t do the things the Lakers wanted on the offensive end.
They missed three after three, repeatedly turned it over and were only slightly better than they were in the same building 11 days ago.
The Lakers lost to the Timberwolves 97-87 on Friday night, unable to make any real offensive improvement from an 80-point game here on Dec. 2.
“We did enough defensively,” Davis said. “Just didn’t do enough offensively.”
In that previous loss at Minnesota, the Lakers (13-12) turned it over 21 times. Friday, they turned it over 22 times.
“They came in a number of ways,” Lakers coach JJ Redick said. “Some passes we tried to fit through tight windows. Never want to inbound the ball to the other team after a made field goal and give up a dunk. Some of it not holding our positioning and timing our physicality to get open. …. Yeah, killed us.”
In three games against Minnesota this season, the Lakers have made just 21 of 96 three-point shots.
Davis led the Lakers with 23 points and Austin Reaves, playing for the first time in five games, scored 18.
Reaves said he thought his play in the first quarter helped lead to the Lakers looking unorganized, with 11 of their turnovers coming in the quarter.
“A lot of that the first quarter was my fault. Not having us organized,” Reaves said. “Not being on the court the last two weeks, I thought, left a little indecision in my mind with some stuff that we could have been doing. So I got to be better there.”
The Lakers’ offense, maybe even more frustratingly, couldn’t capitalize on open shots. D’Angelo Russell missed each of his four shots in the fourth quarter — including three open three-pointers.
“There’s control of the game that you can take or relinquish. And it felt like they had control of the game,” Redick said. “And anytime we got close to sort of being able to be in a position where we could potentially regain control, we kind of shot ourselves in the foot.”
James didn’t accompany the team to Minnesota, the 39-year-old listed as out because of a left foot injury. James hasn’t been around the Lakers this week because of “personal reasons,” according to the Lakers and Redick.
Asked if he knew when James would return, Redick said, “No.”
James showed up on the injury report last week with foot soreness after the loss in Miami. He played in the next game in Atlanta but missed his first game of the season Sunday against Portland.
Because the Lakers didn’t advance in the NBA Cup, the team is playing just three games over a 13-day stretch — a rare midseason break for James, in his 22nd season, to mentally and physically recover.
The Lakers host Memphis on Sunday before playing in Sacramento on Thursday.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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