Lakers fail to learn lesson

It happened again, inexplicably and indelibly.

The Lakers played another one of the worst teams in the league -- make that the worst team in the league -- and fell down, a disturbing trend continuing in a 128-118 loss Tuesday to the Memphis Grizzlies at the FedEx Forum.

The list keeps growing as the losses keep stacking up against teams that don’t do much of anything but lose -- Charlotte, Seattle, New Orleans, Portland, and now Memphis.

On one hand, the Lakers are 4-2 against the best teams in the Western Conference -- Dallas, San Antonio, Phoenix and Utah. On the other, more shaky hand, they have suffered one-sided losses to five of the league’s most pitiful teams by an average of 12.4 points.

Kobe Bryant had 25 points and Maurice Evans had 21, the beginning and end of the highlights for the Lakers. Afterward, their locker room was quiet enough to hear a four-game winning streak snap.

“We just have to learn how to keep the momentum going,” Bryant said two days after an inspiring victory over Dallas. “It’s just not going to do it by itself. We have to learn how to carry it over from game to game, how to regenerate that energy.”

Will it really be learned?

The season-to-date evidence against losing teams doesn’t seem to suggest it.

“Oh, we’re going to learn it,” Bryant said, with a dry, curt laugh. “It’s just a matter of when we learn it. Phil [Jackson] is determined to make sure that we learn it. I am as well. We’ll get to that point.”

There were plenty of points Tuesday for the Grizzlies (9-27), including an unfathomable 46 in the third quarter, three fewer than the record for a Lakers’ opponent in a quarter (Boston scored 49 in a quarter in a March 1993 game.)

It was probably the Lakers’ lowest 12 minutes of the season, considering the competition. Their 57-52 halftime lead became a 19-point deficit by the time it was over. Another lower-echelon team had lowered the boom, despite Jackson’s warnings about these things.

“He’s been telling us that for the last two days,” said forward Luke Walton, who had four points in 33 minutes. “This is the type of game he’s talking about that we need to win. Personally, I thought we were ready, but obviously, we’ve got some more learning to do.

“We outplay, I think, the better teams in the league. Right now, we’re getting outplayed by the teams that aren’t as good and sometimes we just end up winning at the end. It’s too good of a league and it’s too long of a season to get a high playoff seed if we keep playing like that.”

Jackson was calm afterward, even managing an extended chuckle as reporters gathered around him.

“Well, sometimes when things go wrong, it’s infectious,” he said.

He was more animated than usual during the game, bounding out of his seat and yelling at the referees after Andrew Bynum was called for basket interference on a dunk off Jordan Farmar’s miss in the second quarter.

It didn’t help, kind of like his pregame warnings.

“We’re a team that doesn’t understand its own identity,” Jackson said. “We can play at an elevated level against good teams, and the teams that we’re not prepared mentally to go out and compete against, we don’t have an idea how to hold them down, how to take a lead and expose it, do things that change the course of a game and take the heart away from a team. “

Mike Miller and Pau Gasol each had 25 points for the Grizzlies, Miller causing most of the damage in the third quarter with 14 points.

“A lot of these teams are athletic, more athletic than we are,” Bryant said. “When we face teams like this, we really have to focus on our execution.”

Bryant did not play in the fourth quarter. He made seven of 15 shots.

“We played four games in six nights,” Jackson said. “[Tonight against Houston] will be five in seven. This is the kind of game, if you got the game under 10 points in the last three minutes, Kobe would have been back out there.”

mike.bresnahan@latimes.com

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Playing down

Breaking down the Lakers’ record:

* vs. teams .500 or better...13-5 (.722)

* vs. teams under .500...10-7 (.588)

Overall...23-12 (.657)

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KEYS TO THE GAME

* Memphis scored 46 points on 18-for-25 shooting in the third quarter to take a decisive 98-79 lead.

* The Lakers’ supporting cast was a collective group of non-factors. Smush Parker cooled down quickly with nine points. Vladimir Radmanovic had as many fouls (six) as points. Brian Cook had eight points on four-for-13 shooting.

* Buoyed by their 72% shooting in the third quarter, the Grizzlies finished at 49.4% in the game. The Lakers shot 42.2%.

-- MIKE BRESNAHAN