Mavericks Are Merely Pretenders

One night after beating the defending NBA champion Spurs, the Lakers beat a team that has no clue how to defend anything.

Their 114-103 victory over the Dallas Mavericks made for a nice pair of road wins for the Lakers on this quick Texas trip.

The Lakers became the first visiting team to win in American Airlines Center and they ran their winning streak to eight games. This would be the time to start taking them seriously ... if only this game didn’t turn into such a joke.

No, the Mavericks didn’t have Dirk Nowitzki, whose sprained ankle forced him to spend the game sitting next to owner Mark Cuban. But do you really think Nowitzki would have aided the Mavericks’ pitiful defense?

The Lakers did whatever they wanted to in the paint, as if they were dancing down the “Soul Train” line. The only reason the final score was that close was because the Lakers lost interest and let their minds wander to the creative side ... such as when Gary Payton took pictures of Shaquille O’Neal with an imaginary camera after O’Neal was fouled on a dunk.

O’Neal made a short jumper on the Lakers’ first possession. Every other Laker basket in the first quarter came from inside the lane. The Lakers led, 31-20, after the quarter.

By halftime the talk in the press room had moved on to the next Dallas Cowboy game. By the midway point of the fourth quarter, the fans began heading for the exits.

“Don Nelson is notorious for trying to make us match up with what he’s got out there,” said O’Neal, who finished with 25 points and 19 rebounds. “They had a couple of big guys that didn’t play for whatever reason. We just threw it in and we did what we did.”

This game was so comical that even O’Neal could laugh in the fourth quarter when the video screen showed a bloated cartoon likeness of him accompanied by a voice saying “Hey-Hey-Hey, it’s Shaaaaq Albert!”

“That was funny,” O’Neal said. “I laugh. I’m not a serious guy.”

Can we please stop any more talk of the Mavericks as a serious contender for the championship?

It’s almost as if they didn’t put any importance on this game ... after they had been talking about it for two days.

“They came out and fought harder,” Maverick forward Josh Howard said. “We tried to pick it up at the end.

“I don’t know why it was like that. Situations happen. We didn’t come out like we should have. Next time I think we have to come out and don’t take them lightly.”

The Mavericks get credit for two things: Steve Nash’s tenacity and their late fight to get back into the game.

Nash took an elbow from Karl Malone when Malone swung his arms after grabbing a rebound. Nash needed two stitches for a cut on his lower lip, but he returned and led a late charge.

The Lakers led by as many as 19 points. Dallas cut the lead to eight points with 2:30 left in the game. But that was as close as they got.

No transactions were felt around the league as much as the Lakers’ signing of Payton and Malone, but the Mavericks made some waves by sending Nick Van Exel to Golden State in a trade that brought in Antawn Jamison, and packing Raef LaFrentz, Chris Mills and Jiri Welsch to Boston for Antoine Walker and Tony Delk.

Cuban said the moves were not part of a Western Conference arms race with the Lakers.

“We never do anything in response to another team -- ever,” Cuban said. “I’ve said I’m always going to be opportunistic. If we can improve our team, particularly with someone we think can help us over a longer period of time, that’s what we do. We got younger, we got more athletic. We got Nellie’s point forward [Walker]. If the Lakers had stayed pat, we would have done the same thing.”

The Mavericks were talking to Malone. Malone implied the other day that he was misled during the negotiations.

“Some guys lied, of course,” he said during a discussion of the free agency process.

Dallas?

“Some guys lied,” he said, with a smile.

Cuban said: “We went after Alonzo Mourning first. We told Karl and his agent that. We wanted a low-post presence, where Karl is a high-post presence, a guy who gets out and runs. No knock on Karl, and I told him that.”

They lost out on Mourning when he signed with the New Jersey Nets. Mourning retired Nov. 24, when his kidney disease worsened to the point that he will require a transplant. The Mavericks still missed out. Even Mourning sitting on the bench would provide a stronger inside presence than anyone the Mavericks have on the active roster.

I didn’t like the move that sent Van Exel packing, because he had more heart than anyone else on the team. The Walker move was a positive, because he brings more skills to the table than the soft LaFrentz. But Walker hasn’t addressed the Mavericks’ long-term deficiency at the defensive end of the court.

Walker averages 16 points and four assists and leads the Mavericks in rebounding with just under 10 per game.

But the Dallas Morning News pointed out another telling stat: In a recent three-game stretch, the Mavericks were outscored by 46 points when Walker was on the court.

This game made it clear: the Laker moves were the only ones that mattered this summer.

“We don’t really worry about what other people are trying to do,” O’Neal said. “We know that our team is stacked also. We know that teams are going to have to match up against us, not us match up against them.”

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com.