DALLAS -- Sensing an opportunity, Dirk Nowitzki found his highest gear and kicked it into a full sprint as he crossed half court, never mind the 37-year-old 7-footer’s sore right knee. Nowitzki caught a fastball from Raymond Felton near the free throw line, took two steps and jumped as high as he could at his ripe old age, hoping to finish the fast break with his just second dunk of 2016.

Denied.

Russell Westbrook, the ridiculously springy Oklahoma City Thunder superstar, swooped in from the other side of the lane and swatted the ball off the glass. Seconds later, Westbrook fired a lefty bullet to Enes Kanter for an uncontested dunk, a four-point swing in Oklahoma City’s favor in a flash.

“I felt like my knee buckled, so I was actually kind of glad he got there, because I probably would have got hung on the rim, to be honest,” Nowitzki said after the Thunder regained the series lead with a 131-102 rout of his Dallas Mavericks in Thursday’s Game 3 at the American Airlines Center. “I’m kind of glad he blocked it. But heck of a play on his part.”

Some fights -- and some flights -- just aren’t fair. That pretty much sums up this series so far.

Not many playoff series present athletic mismatches that are this dramatic. Precious few teams in NBA history have featured a pair of athletic freaks the caliber of Westbrook and Kevin Durant, and they’re surrounded by young, long-limbed leapers in the starting lineup. By contrast, the Mavs are one of the oldest and slowest teams in the league even when they aren’t dealing with a long list of medical issues, as they are now.

It’s a minor miracle that Dallas is down only one game despite a 66-point differential in the series. Tip your cap to the Mavs for making Game 2 ugly enough to pull off a massive upset -- and getting lucky enough to have Thunder center Steven Adams' potential game-winning tip come a split-second too late to count.

Maybe the most frightening fact about Oklahoma City’s two blowout wins is that the Thunder haven’t had to get spectacular performances from their superstars to run the Mavs off the floor. That’s not to say that the Thunder’s stars have played poorly aside from Durant’s historically horrible Game 2 shooting performance, but they haven’t blown up by their All-NBA standards, either. Yes, a 34-point night for Durant and a 26-point, 15-assist outing for Westbrook are pretty ho-hum performances for them.

Who on the Mavs is capable of matching that kind of production?

Sure, Nowitzki is sixth on the all-time scoring list, but he scored more than 34 points all of once this season. His knee was so sore after Game 2 that he struggled to walk down the stairs after the team’s flight landed, though he reported that the only time it really presented a problem Thursday night was on that ill-fated dunk attempt. Nowitzki’s 16-point, 7-of-12 outing Thursday night is pretty close to his norm now.

Former All-Star point guard Deron Williams, a max-contract bust in Brooklyn in large part due to injuries, had a couple of turn-back-the-clock 20-10 nights for Dallas this season. But he has been bitten hard by the injury bug again, sitting out Game 3 because of a sports hernia that puts his status for the rest of the series in question.

Chandler Parsons, the forward who averaged a highly efficient 19 points per game over a two-month stretch, won’t play a second in the playoffs after suffering a season-ending knee injury for the second consecutive year.

J.J. Barea, the 10-year vet who had the best week of his career to spark the late-season winning streak that keyed the Mavs’ playoff push, gutted it out in Game 3 despite a sore right groin. His 15-point, seven-assist showing was pretty impressive, given that it looked as though the itty-bitty guard was playing in slow motion, unable to explode at all when going to his strong side.

Shooting guard Wesley Matthews suffered through the worst shooting season of his career while coming back from a ruptured left Achilles tendon. He got in a groove after a slow start Thursday night, finishing with a team-high 22 points on 6-of-13 shooting, but the Mavs will need much more firepower to keep up with the Thunder.

Actually, the Mavs must force OKC into playing a hideous style of basketball to have any hope.

“We’ve got to make it a grind-it-out game,” said Felton, a journeyman guard who ranks second on the Mavs in scoring and rebounding this series. “Slow the game down, play with more grit, play with a little more attitude.”

Dallas does not deny that it is on the wrong end of a massive talent disparity in this series. But the Mavs hang on to the belief that they can steal another game -- and maybe even the series -- if they can just keep it close and expose the Thunder’s issues slamming the door down the stretch.

“Look, their talent is a significant problem,” Dallas coach Rick Carlisle said. “We know that. The way you mitigate it is to be really tied together and play extremely hard. ... They are beatable, but we’ve got to come out with a better disposition. It’s as simple as that.”

On paper, the Mavs are simply overmatched by the Thunder’s awesome athleticism and skill. That has been the case on the court in two of the three games, too.