This team has to be better than this, doesn’t it?

I can envision Los Angeles Lakers fans saying that, back in SoCal.

This 0-3 thing on a team with Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard, Steve Nash and Pau Gasol … it can’t be what they really are about.

Can it?

I was so impressed by Mitch Kupchak’s ability to add Howard and Nash, without giving up Gasol, that I commissioned a 1,600-word story by Steve Dilbeck, a former colleague, to run in The National, about the Lakers’ bold refusal to go quietly into that good night of mediocrity.

But 0-3?

When Dilbeck spoke with Kobe Bryant, back when the Lakers were 0-7 in the exhibition season, the veteran chuckled at the notion that some sort of concern — major concern — might be warranted.

Apparently, he did the same after the loss to the Clippers tonight, in slightly different form.

He apparently was asked when Lakers fans should begin to panic, and he said: “Now.”

But wasn’t serious.

They can’t be this bad.

Friends back in SoCal tell me that defense is a big issue. And we could have expected some of that with Nash out there. The man is 38 years old; he can’t cover anyone. (Which just means another year of the Lakers having a point guard who can’t cover anyone. It’s been, what, a decade now?)

But shouldn’t Kobe be able to be at least competent at D? (As opposed to him in his prime, when he was quite good.) And Gasol should be at least middling.

Howard, of course, when he is fully recovered from back surgery, ought to keep people out of the lane. And Metta World Peace can still check people, right?

The concern here, of course, is the bench. Nash already is nicked up (it happens a lot to guys in their 30s), and Steve Blake played the point against the Clippers … and things did not go well.

The other vaguely competent reserve is Antawn Jamison, but he is 36 all of a sudden.

(Guys who are not stars, you hardly notice them crossing into their dotage. Seems to me as if Juwan Howard of Fab Five fame joined the league just the other day, but the man is 39 and his Michigan teammates Jalen Rose and Chris Webber have been retired for years.)

(Mostly, it’s about me being old. Nearly anything that has happened since 1990 seems recent, to me.)

The rest of the bench is a disaster area. A genuine “who are those guys?” collection.

So, the club will need the starters to stay healthy, and it will need the Dwight Howard who looked like Superman in Florida, and it needs Nash not-to-be done, and an engaged Pau Gasol.

But they also need to play Kobe something less than 43 minutes (even if he scores 40), because you can’t have him do that all year.

I’m not ready to give up on this team. OK, they won’t win 60. But maybe they still have a shot to get to the fourth seed in the Western Conference, so they don’t have to play somebody like Oklahoma City right off. And maybe by April, if they’re not too worn down, they can do what I thought they might be able to do — contend for a championship.

This has to turn around, doesn’t it?  But, yes, I know: Sometimes it gets late early.