The alarm that LeBron James sounded after the Lakers’ season opener got a little louder Thursday.

The Lakers couldn’t make three-point shots again and fell to the Clippers as a direct result, 103-97, Thursday at Crypto.com Arena.

Their defense was on point, their turnovers were minimal. It was almost a perfect game for the Lakers...except that one nagging stat. They made only nine of 45 shots from three-point range for a numbingly low 20% success rate on a very high volume of attempts.

“Nothing you can do. Just keep shooting,” Lakers center Anthony Davis said.

It was excruciatingly obvious in the fourth quarter as the Lakers stayed with the highly talented Clippers, possession after possession, but missed all nine of their three-point shots.

New Lakers Coach Darvin Ham tried to sound optimistic after the game. The Lakers are 0-2 in a very young season.

The numbers don’t lie, though. The Lakers have made only 19 of 85 shots from three-point range so far. Plenty of them were with players left unguarded as defenses collapse around LeBron James and Anthony Davis down low.

“If they want to give us those shots, we’ll accept them wholeheartedly,” Ham said, adding that players have made their threes in practice and shoot-around situations. “They’ve got to do it on the game floor. It’s as simple as that.”

James raised eyebrows after the opener when he said, “we’re not a team that’s constructed of great shooting. And that’s just what the truth of the matter is.”

Two days later, Russell Westbrook missed all 11 of his shots, including 0 for 6 from deep. His backcourt mate, Patrick Beverley, was one for seven overall. Reserve guard Kendrick Nunn missed all seven of his shots.

The Lakers trailed by 16 in the first half but pulled into a 56-56 halftime tie thanks to a steady diet of James, Davis and new starter Lonnie Walker IV (26 points overall). The Lakers were incredibly efficient with the ball, collecting 16 assists and only three turnovers in the half.

In a scary moment for the Lakers, Davis took a hard fall early in the third quarter while trying to defend Kawhi Leonard. He landed hard on his backside and briefly went back toward the locker room. He re-entered the game with about five minutes left in the third quarter and finished with 25 points. He said afterward he should be ready to play again Sunday against Portland, even though it’s an early 12:30 pm start.

James scored 20 points, including a split-the-defense hammer dunk that belied his age — 38 years old in two months.

For years — make that decades — the Lakers dominated the Clippers.

Their cross-town rivalry was hardly that. The “Showtime” Lakers went 46-11 against the Clippers in the 1980s, the Shaq-Kobe Lakers once ran off 16 consecutive wins against them and the Kobe-Pau Gasol teams won as many as nine in a row against the Clippers.

The U-turn in recent years continued, however, as John Wall scored 15 points Thursday and Kawhi Leonard added 14 in his first game action since tearing the ACL in his right knee in June 2021.

The Clippers beat the Lakers for an eighth consecutive time and moved to 33-7 against them since 2012.

“Is it safe to say they run LA?” TNT analyst Reggie Miller asked afterward.

“You can’t run LA without a ring,” TNT analyst Candace Parker replied quickly.

Indeed, the Lakers have 17 championships in their history while the Clippers have never even been to the NBA Finals.

But on this night, as all the missed outside shots piled up around the Lakers’ feet, the Clippers were better. At least in one very important department.