Lakers tossed aside in Texas

The Lakers will have to be happy with a Texas one-step.

It was a tall order to begin with, a 10-gallon hat’s worth of talent and trouble awaiting them 24 hours after a successful night in San Antonio. Sure enough, they tumbled against the Dallas Mavericks, hard, 114-95, Thursday at American Airlines Center.

What the Lakers did to the Spurs could not be done a night later against the younger, spryer, man-on-fire Mavericks.

It was interesting for a quarter, not very suspenseful by halftime, and obviously over by the time the team with the league’s best record opened a 27-point lead with a few minutes left in the third quarter.

Kobe Bryant was fine -- 26 points and five assists -- but “the others” were elsewhere, and the Lakers’ defense was absent and unaccounted for.

The Mavericks, who lost their first four games of the season, improved to 33-8. The Lakers, well, they got 17 points from Jordan Farmar. And they didn’t allow more than 115 points. And they managed to survive another night in surprisingly chilly Texas. And ...

“It’s very disappointing,” said forward Luke Walton, who had eight points. “To get blown out like that is kind of like getting embarrassed. We feel that we’re a better team than we were” Thursday.

It was strange to hear it in another arena, but the fourth-quarter “M-V-P” chants weren’t for Bryant, but for Dirk Nowitzki, who had 27 points and 10 rebounds.

It seemed like a Dallas kind of night from the start, with guard-forward Jerry Stackhouse singing the national anthem -- very capably -- and, a few minutes later, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban howling along with the lyrics to “Welcome to the Jungle” as the teams prepared for tip-off.

It was treacherous terrain for the Lakers, who led after one, 28-26, but let the Mavericks rip free for 69 combined points in the second and third quarters. The stats were as unwelcome as could be for the Lakers: The Mavericks almost doubled them in rebounds, 53-28, and annihilated them in blocked shots, 8-1.

“Any time you get that beat up that bad on the inside like we did tonight, you’re not going to have much of a chance of performing in a ballgame,” Lakers Coach Phil Jackson said.

Before the game, with the glow of the victory over San Antonio still somewhere in their systems, Jackson spoke favorably of Bryant, bringing up an e.e. cummings poem that he couldn’t quite remember the name of, something about “placing faith in somebody and seeing the miracle of other people,” he said.

Bryant’s share-the-wealth mantra has been a difference-maker this season, Jackson concluded.

“That engenders confidence,” he said. “I think that’s the thing that we’ve been trying to preach over the years. Sometimes you have these exceptional players say, ‘Hey a double team’s not enough.’ They don’t understand that an open shot with somebody else is probably going to be a higher percentage. They want to be the controlling person in that situation. So it’s something about giving up, giving over to that trust. That’s very important.”

There wasn’t anything poetic about the Lakers (26-14) after the first quarter Thursday.

They trailed at halftime, 60-48, and stumbled in the third quarter, going 7:11 without a field goal before Farmar hit a three-point shot with 1:12 left in the quarter.

“Against these teams, you want to hang in there a bit and give yourself a chance,” Bryant said.

It got so bad that Bryant missed a dunk and, after getting ribbed by Devean George, could only smile after Anthony Johnson grabbed the long rebound and dunked at the other end. That Bryant was in the game with less than three minutes to play and the Lakers down 20-plus points was another question.

“It was a blowout game,” Bryant said. “I was just trying to get back in and get some stops.”

The current Lakers took a step back, but one of the former Lakers wasn’t as upset. George started for the Mavericks and had 14 points on seven-for-10 shooting.

“Teams have been playing us pretty well early on, but I think once we make our adjustments, and once we buckle down and start trusting our system, we start running away with games,” he said.

mike.bresnahan@latimes.com