Los Angeles Lakers: 3 things the Lakers need to do to take care of business

3. “All I want to do is go out with the shooters”

It’s usually a good thing when a basketball player’s name marks the number one trend on Twitter. That will generally take place when said name sinks home a big bucket, makes an incredible defensive play, or wows the social media landscape with some inhuman feat of an epic magnitude.

But when you’ve drawn enough vying power from basketball Tweeters to vault yourself into the top slot on the app based on poor performance alone, you know you’ve presented your team (and fans) with nothing short of a travesty.

Enter Daniel Richard Green (known as “Danny” for short) who transformed himself into arguably the most widely spoken household name of the night after beginning Game 1 with a shooting performance that mirrored, as broadcaster Mark Jones would say “LA Fitness at 3 o’clock.”

Green’s opening stat line was horrendous. He acclimated himself to the Portland defense with a fair-weather self-introduction, failing to impress the Blazers with his initial shooting resumé by missing his first three attempts from the floor – those blunders which included a devastating boomerang rejection that was sent careening right back to sender once it left his hands, and an untimely check-in on the arena’s wind trajectory with a sailing air-ball.

His shortcomings only continued from there, and despite mustering conversions on two of his eight 3-point tries, his totalitarian 25 percent mark from both deep-range and the floor pales in comparative standing to the $30 million mark the Los Angeles Lakers tabbed on him at the season’s inception.

And his inability to cash in from distance proved contagious. His starting running-mate Kentavious Caldwell-Pope was even worse during the matchup, posting an 0-of-9 line on his shot attempts throughout the entirety of his 29 game minutes.

The guard combo was a losing pair when meshed together, and had a combined -38 plus-minus tabbing on night one.

But the shooting woes didn’t stop there.  A 5-32 total from beyond the arc paired with a 35 percent overall team clip was worsened by the fact that two of the unit’s best deep threats, J.R. Smith and Dion Waiters, failed to see substantial playing time.

Putting the ball in the basket is the name of the game, and as much as Portland’s defensive front has been lambasted for their woes coming into this series, an inability to eclipse 50 percent from any singular player just won’t cut it for LA.

And if one stat can serve as the comprehensive tell-all of just how poorly they performed shooting-wise, it’s this one: they went 9-of-54 outside of the restricted area.

The team rakes in one of the highest total payrolls in the association, but now is the time above all others to put their money where their mouth is.