Josh McDaniels’ Las Vegas gamble caused the Raiders to bust.

The head coach made a puzzling decision to kick a field goal while trailing by eight and facing a fourth-and-four at the Steelers’ eight-yard line with 2:25 remaining in Sunday’s 23-18 loss.

The analytics — and most pundits watching the game — said the Raiders made the wrong call in that spot.

Las Vegas eventually got the ball back, but at its own 15-yard line with just 12 seconds left and no timeouts.

Raiders quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo proceeded to throw a game-clinching interception.

“You have two choices there,” McDaniels said. “You try to make it a five-point game, where you have an opportunity to win it with the touchdown if you get the ball back. Or you try to go for it there, and then if you happen to convert then you’ve got to make the two-point conversion and all the rest of it. Those are the decisions you got to make.”

Coaching decisions are always magnified in the final minutes of games, and they especially loom large when they do not pan out like McDaniels’ call Sunday night.

The Raiders trailed 23-15 when they moved the ball to the Steelers’ 14-yard line with a little more than three minutes remaining.

A quick completion for six yards, followed by two incompletions, set up the fourth-down call with 2:25 remaining.

ESPN reported the Raiders had a 15.8 percent chance of winning had they gone for the first down, and just a 10.2 percent chance of winning with a kick.

“A big error by McDaniels,” tweeted ESPN analytics writer Seth Walder.

McDaniels’ said his decision did not indicate a lack of confidence in his offense.

“You’re going to need another possession anyway, you know what I mean?” McDaniels said. “So, it is not a lack of confidence. We went for it multiple times.”

Opting to kick meant the suspect Raiders defense needed to make a stop, and the Steelers converted a third-and-two to all but end the game, as quarterback Kenny Pickett found a wide-open Allen Robinson for a six-yard gain.

“I thought we did a decent job putting ourselves in third down there the next series with the defense to try to have a play to get off the field, but didn’t handle that play very well,” McDaniels said.

Making McDaniels’ decision even more puzzling is that the Steelers gave the Raiders second life on the aforementioned drive after a penalty on fourth down.

The Raiders opted to kick a 48-yard field goal with a little more than three minutes left while facing a fourth-and-six, but the Steelers were flagged for leverage (which is when a defensive player leaps off or stands on another player in order to block a kick).

Going for it in that spot had just a 0.1-percent win-probability percentage increase than settling for the kick (10.7 to 10.6), per ESPN’s models, making it a true coin flip.

But to then settle for a field goal later — and after driving inside the 10-yard line — meant the Raiders just burned extra time that could have been used to get a defensive stop.

“I thought we had an opportunity to get the ball back there with maybe a couple of minutes to go and have a shot to go down there and win it with a touchdown,” McDaniels said. “That was the thought process.”

He later added: “You can go either way with those.”

Raiders running back Josh Jacobs defended his coach.

“I agree with what coach did,” Jacobs said, per ESPN. “The defense was starting to play good at the end of the game. We could have got the ball back with time to score.”

The Raiders are now 1-2 and visit the Chargers next week, while the Steelers are 2-1 and will hit the road to battle the Texans.