LOS ANGELES — The eve of Election Day proved to be a scathing referendum on a failed start to the season for the Miami Heat.

In the wake of Monday night’s 138-117 loss to the Los Angeles Lakers, a game Lakers guard Luka Doncic dominated with his 42 points, it left the Heat seeing red and feeling more than blue.

“We’re not playing hard enough,” prized offseason acquisition Giannis Antetokounmpo said, his comment coming in a Crypto.com locker room long vacated by the rest of his teammates, speaking nearly 90 minutes after Monday night’s humbling final buzzer. “We’ve got to play harder. We’ve got to have some pride. We’ve got to have some pride. Individual pride, first of all.

“And then we’ve got to keep one another accountable and trust one another defensively. Right now we don’t trust one another. We’re not giving that extra effort.”

It was just two weeks ago that the Heat exited the preseason confident that, at the least, their defense would carry them through the adjustment period to a new rotation, fuel a new optimism.

Instead, the team awoke Tuesday ranked No. 27 in the league in defensive rating, 27th in points allowed, 29th in opposing 3-point percentage, with opponents making a league-high 17.3 3-pointers per game.

“We got to figure this out,” center Bam Adebayo said. “Nobody is going to come save this ship. We got to dig ourselves out of this hole. And obviously, when we get tired of touching that hot stove enough, we’re going to figure it out.”

Instead, opposing stars are sizzling against a shockingly tepid Heat defensive response. Even before Donic’s 42 points on Monday night at the start of this five-game western swing, there were 45 points from Minnesota’s Anthony Edwards in the Heat’s opening-night loss, 34 from Charlotte’s Brandon Miller in a loss to the Hornets and 29 to Dallas’ Cooper Flagg in a loss to the Mavericks.

“We’ve played Anthony Edwards; we didn’t take his game away,” Antetokounmpo said. “We played Luka; we didn’t take his game away. We’ve just got to figure out a game plan that can work against players like that.”

Against the Lakers, it wasn’t only Doncic’s scoring, it also was yielding 13 assists to the Lakers’ star, effectively allowing him get his own and allowing his teammates to get their own, with Austin Reeves adding 27 points.

The thought entering the season was that a roster featuring respected defenders such as Antetokounmpo, Adebayo, Andrew Wiggins and Davion Mitchell would hardly need to resort to schemes and gimmicks.

Instead, the Heat early on in Monday night’s game were reduced to trapping and double-teaming Donic and eventually forced into the Hail Mary of a zone.

“I think that we think that it’s gonna happen because we’re really good individual defenders,” Mitchell said of what is proving to be a fatal flaw. “If we don’t, if you don’t want to play defense as a team, then you can’t do it by yourself. So, it’s not surprising.”

But it assuredly is humbling, even a bit humiliating.

“The starting group, it’s almost like we’re going through the motions,” Antetokounmpo said. “We can be better.”

And it all played Monday night out in front of Heat President Pat Riley, who took it in from the stands, seated just a few rows back from the Heat bench, witness to the Heat allowing a staggering 79 points in the first half, including 24 by that stage to Doncic.

“In the first half they were getting everything. He had the 24 (appearing) on his way to 50,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “And then the support guys, and I say that with great, great respect, they had 45. So we’re losing those battles and losing the battles with him, even while we’re trying to trap and get the ball out of his hands.

“It’s not good enough. Our locker room knows it’s not good enough. We need to be just a whole lot more consistent defensively, regardless of whatever the scheme may be.”

Two weeks in, and it’s as if a degree of trust is gone.

“We got to full-out trust each other,” Adebayo said, “because a lot of times I feel like when fatigue sets in, we stop communicating, and that’s when mistakes happen. That’s when the lack of effort is there. Got to figure it out.”

With that, the Heat and the rest of the NBA took Tuesday off, in deference to Election Day, with Spoelstra left to ruminate on referendums of his own ahead of Wednesday night’s game against the Los Angeles Clippers at the Intuit Dome.

“I need to do a better job of getting this group to defend to our potential,” Spoelstra said in a postgame interview that came off as more of a confessional. “We’re all accountable to this, everybody in that locker room, the players and the staff alike, we have to figure it out.”