The Nets are confident that the shots will start falling eventually, but to this point, the 3-point shooting hasn’t quite been there. 

Going into Tuesday’s game in Sacramento, the Nets are shooting just 35.9 percent from beyond the arc and taking just 32.1 3-pointers per game, ranking 15th and 22nd in the league, respectively. That comes down to a few factors mostly out of the Nets’ control — Seth Curry’s lingering injury, a non-shooter in Ben Simmons playing significant minutes when healthy, Kyrie Irving’s suspension. 

But the loss to the Lakers, in which Brooklyn shot 7-for-27 from beyond the arc, gave a reminder that their shooters are underperforming, too — Kevin Durant and Joe Harris were the only players to hit more than one 3-pointer. 

“We got some good shots,” Durant told reporters following Sunday’s 116-103 loss to the Lakers. “I feel like we got some wide-open looks that were in and out from a lot of guys and you just got to live with that stuff, to be honest. Like I said [Saturday], as long as we’re generating good looks and I think we got a lot of corner 3s that went in and out that could have cut the lead or gave us some momentum, but they just didn’t go in. But that’s the name of the game so you got to go back down there and defend.” 

Beyond a somewhat out-of-nowhere start from Yuta Watanabe, who is hitting 3-pointers at an unsustainable 50 percent clip, and Royce O’Neale’s impressive 42 percent start, nearly every volume shooter on the Nets is underperforming from 3-point range. 

Durant, a career 38.3 percent 3-point shooter, is hitting just 35.8 percent of his shots. Harris, upon returning from ankle injuries that required surgery last season, has experienced a drastic drop-off, shooting a career-low 34.5 percent. The last time he was below 40 percent was 2016-17. 

Curry has shot well, but played just five games. Irving, prior to his suspension, was taking over nine 3s per game and hitting just 28 percent of them. 

The Nets have played just 14 games, little enough that the small sample size axiom still applies, but enough that it is losing potency with each passing poor performance. And with a 6-8 record, the Nets are using up their margin for error early in the schedule. 

“We need a few of those to go in,” head coach Jacque Vaughn admitted following Sunday’s game. “I think we were 2-for-16 at halftime with some really good looks. It’s amazing how that could have changed the tempo and direction of the game.” 

Indeed, one of the enduring lessons of the last decade in the NBA is that good 3-point shooting can change any game at any moment. And the Nets, right now, don’t have it. 

Harris, asked about the shooting woes after the game, pointed to the Nets’ defense as an underlying issue. 

On a per-possession basis, the Nets rank 13th in defense, and they’re allowing over a point on each trip down the court, per NBA.com. As an offshoot of that, they’re 19th in transition scoring per game, with a hair over 19 points. To make matters worse, they’re shooting poorly in transition, ranking 27th in effective field-goal percentage at 53.8 percent. 

“The fourth quarter [against the Lakers], it was just one of those things where just because we weren’t able to get stops, we were always going against a set defense, having to play in the half-court a lot,” Harris said. “And we didn’t get a lot of easy looks in transition that gave us any sort of momentum.”