Always looking to take two steps forward and one step back, the Lakers missed a big opportunity on Tuesday. Playing against a Mavs team that defeated both Luka Dončić and Kyrie Irving, the Lakers laid an egg and fell in a game that ultimately wasn’t even close.

While there was plenty of blame to go around, the Lakers’ defensive performance was…lackluster at best.

Sloppy closeouts, missed rotations and constant blow-bys led to the Mavericks shooting 52.3% from the field while making 18 3-pointers. All in all, not great!

Head coach JJ Redick has expressed many emotions in his postgame press conferences this season: frustration, desperation, disappointment. On Tuesday, however, it was a new one.

Confusion.

“Our fundamental defense from day one just wasn’t good,” Redick said. “Low Man wasn’t there. When he was there, there was no weakside rotation. We just couldn’t stop it.”

“I’m not sure what our rotations were like. I’ve never seen us try to do what we did. I haven’t seen the film yet. We just watch it live and talk to the assistants who saw it on film. We’re not sure what was going on with the shift positioning and rotations. Never seen it before.”

Mishaps like the ones the Lakers had on defense are a combination of many things going wrong. In the Lakers’ case, it was even the basic things they didn’t do.

The result was a multitude of open 3-pointers on drives and kicks. That was never more evident in the second half than when the Mavs scored four straight three points, capping a tremendous run from which the Lakers never recovered.

When asked what the team could have done in such a situation, Redick explained the various options…and discussed how the Lakers did neither.

“You can do two things,” Redick said. “One of them is that you stick with your own man… or you can just split up and take cutters. We did neither one nor the other. I’ve never seen this kind of reporting before either.”

Ideally, you don’t want your head coach to keep emphasizing after the game that he’s never seen his team do something before, especially if it was as disastrous as what the Lakers did.

If you’re a Lakers fan looking for a glimmer of hope, you’ll find that the Lakers have generally responded well after tough losses. Unfortunately, another thing that they have done way too much sampling this season is.

You can follow Jacob on Twitter at @JacobRude.