The Mavs have more shooters than just about anyone, so they're banking on this adage more than anyone else. Besides leading the league in scoring at 105 points per game, Dallas was in the top three in overall field-goal shooting, 3-point shooting and free-throw shooting all season. You have to score big to beat L.A., and that's Dallas' forte.

If they can last long enough in the playoffs to see the champs, the Mavs believe they can cause the Lakers problems by trotting out a string of players Shaquille O'Neal will hate guarding. They want to spread the floor, playing Dirk Nowitzki and Raef LaFrentz in tandem to draw O'Neal to the perimeter, in hopes of unclogging the lane for drive-and-kick guards Steve Nash and Nick Van Exel. Don Nelson will also send in Wang Zhizhi to spell his preferred 7-footers to sustain that approach.

In essence, realizing early this season that no one they employed or could acquire can match up with O'Neal, the Mavs went to the opposite extreme to get as many long-range bombers as they could find. Short of someone stomping on Shaq's bad toe to get him out of there completely, it's the most interesting game plan in circulation, albeit a long shot. Literally.

Only thing that aggravates Shaq's toe more than chasing after a mobile big man on the perimeter is running back down the floor to play fast-break defense. The constant pain in that arthritic toe has severely hampered O'Neal's mobility, lessening his impact as a defensive wrecking ball. On the boards, in transition, as a shot-blocker -- O'Neal, on one foot, isn't nearly as dominant in those areas as he was during the past two title runs. Nash and Van Exel are glad to hear it, too.

Against the Lakers, the Mavs will always look to run, seeking to put the L.A. defense under duress before it can set up. Since Dallas is not a good rebounding team, that means running after the Lakers' made baskets -- anything to try to leave O'Neal in the dust. Nash and especially Van Exel will have a quickness advantage over any of Phil Jackson's guards, which is why they'll be urged to speed up the tempo. The Lakers have historically struggled a bit with full-court pressure as well, and that's another tactic worth trying in an attempt to disrupt L.A.'s smooth-flowing triangle offense.

Shaq and Kobe Bryant -- depending on where you rank Tim Duncan, Allen Iverson, Jason Kidd and Tracy McGrady -- are still widely regarded as the two best players in the game. No other team has a twosome close to L.A.'s tag team.

The obvious counter, especially from Dallas and Sacramento, is depth. Sustained waves of good players to try to wear down Batman and Robin and the so-called Superfriends around them: Derek Fisher, Rick Fox, Robert Horry, et al. Especially if Horry's stomach injury is serious.

The Kings, long considered the NBA's deepest team, actually go just eight deep when it matters, with really only Bobby Jackson, Scot Pollard and Hedo Turkoglu behind the starters. The Mavs are arguably even deeper now, with Van Exel coming off the bench along with their fearless energy source, Eduardo Najera and a couple different types of 7-footers (Wang and Shawn Bradley). Najera, furthermore, is part of a swing rotation that also includes Adrian Griffin and Greg Buckner. One of those three will start, but all contribute in the hunt for rebounds, loose balls and garbage points.

Can Phil go that deep? We'll see. That could mean depending on Samaki Walker/Lindsey Hunter/Mitch Richmond at crunch time, with only Walker approaching the production L.A. envisioned last summer when it added those guys.

Three reasons why Mavericks can't

You know all the clichés about the grinding, pound-it-in pace of playoff basketball. Just remember there's a reason they're clichés. Reason being: The theories get repeated a lot because they're usually true.

Perimeter teams such as Dallas are going to struggle in the more physical postseason if they're living off jumpers. Even the optimistic Van Exel admits, "There's no way you can win a championship shooting 3-pointers." Research backs up Nick's fretting, as only one team in recent memory -- Houston in both its title runs in 1994 and 1995 -- led the league in taking and making 3s en route to the shiny gold trophy.

In 1994, the Rockets made 429 3-pointers in 1,285 attempts. In 1995, they sank 646 of 1,757. The Mavs are right there with the '95 Rockets at 621-for-1,645. The difference, of course, is that those Rockets also had a considerable inside presence named Hakeem Olajuwon. The Mavs' best post-up players might be Nash and Van Exel.

Throw in Dallas' standing as the league's 28th-best defensive unit (allowing 101 points per game) and a bottom-10 in rebound differential (minus-2.1 per game) and the clichés only get louder.

	The Mavericks are just 2-21 against the Shaq-and-Kobe Lakers.

Oh, yeah. Him.

No one in the league has an answer for O'Neal, even when he's down to one foot and one wrist, but Shaq might be a bigger problem for the Mavericks than anyone else among the elite. All of Dallas' 7-footers are perimeter players except Bradley, who Shaq loves abusing as much as anyone in the league. Dallas is thus relieved any time it holds O'Neal under 40, which might explain why it has beaten L.A. only twice in 23 tries since Shaq joined the Lakers in 1996.

To keep its best players on the floor and give itself any chance of corralling O'Neal, Dallas will run a lot of zone defense against the Lakers. The idea is to swarm Shaq and run a string of fresh bodies at Bryant and pray that Fisher, Fox and Horry don't win the game from the 3-point line, like they usually do in the playoffs.

The triumvirate of Griffin, Buckner and Johnny Newman helped hound Kobe into 36.3-percent shooting -- for an average of just 17.3 points -- in the teams' four regular-season meetings. But Shaq? Against the Mavs and foils Don Nelson and Mark Cuban, folks he loves to show up, O'Neal even makes his free throws.