The Los Angeles Lakers lost 130-120 on Wednesday night, dropping to 0-3 versus their division rivals this season. The Lakers’ problems with the Sacramento Kings have not abated. With 44 points on the evening, De’Aaron Fox tied a career high as the Lakers defence, led by Austin Reaves, could not stop him from getting into the paint.

Before everything fell apart, the Lakers had a 19-point lead late in the first quarter and were actually off to a tremendous start in the game. After scoring the last 10 points of the first quarter, the Kings dominated the second quarter, winning 44–20, and they never looked back. Reaves acknowledged that he was disappointed with the outcome for the team as a whole as well as for himself.

Extremely annoying. Reaves stated, “You should always be upset when you lose. “You ought to have some sort of emotional response to your individual performance and ideas for how you may improve the team’s chances of winning. We had a tremendously fantastic first quarter, as you mentioned, but we also had a really good first nine minutes. Our task is to devise a way to sustain that for an entire 48-minute duration.

The Lakers’ inability to match Fox and Malik Monk’s dominance was one of the reasons they were unable to continue. Although Fox is already among the NBA’s best scorers, he particularly smashes the Lakers, scoring 36.3 points per game on average so far this season. Reaves acknowledged that it is almost hard to keep Fox under check because of the way the Kings have assembled their roster in addition to Fox.

“It’s difficult to guard someone like De’Aaron because, in my opinion, he wasn’t a great three-point shooter early in his career,” Reaves continued. However, he’s shooting it now, confidently shooting it, and creating them. Taking everything into consideration, everything appears to be in order as it comes off his hands. He’s also maybe one of the league’s fastest guards, so keeping him out of your paint is a difficult challenge.

However, I believe that you had to protect him in that manner as a group. You need five guys to guard him. They’ve done a great job arranging that lineup so that Sabonis can shoot and he can play. It’s difficult, but in order to try to keep ahead of him, we and I both need to do better.

Naturally, despite the Lakers’ best efforts to challenge and defend Fox and Monk, the two were still able to make a number of difficult shots, which only makes things more frustrating. Indeed. It’s disheartening if, as a competitor, you have a task in front of you and you fail on that possession,” Reaves remarked. Or at the very least, I find it annoying.

“There were a few occasions when I felt like I was playing solid defence, but Malik and De’Aaron were just making shots.” That demonstrates their level of expertise and ability to shoot the ball into the hoop. However, since it’s basketball, you know going into every game that you won’t be able to limit the opposition to 10 points. They score more points than any other club in the league, therefore you have to move on to the next possession quickly and have an extremely short short-term memory.

Unfortunately for Reaves and the Lakers, their division adversary continued to prove to be a nightmare opponent for this club, resulting in additional points for the Kings on the following possession.