Simply Mavelous!

Who let these Dallas Mavericks into the NBA postseason anyway? Don't they know that playoff games are supposed to be tortured endeavors, tortoise-paced and coarse in execution, as entertaining as an agricultural subcommittee hearing on C-SPAN? At this stage of the game we're accustomed to pound-it-into-the-paint muscle ball, and now along comes this troupe of telegenic merengue dancers from Big D. While the runnin' and gunnin' Sacramento Kings were laboring to get by the Utah Jazz last week, the Mavs were maintaining the up-tempo style they used during the regular season, laying an average of 112.7 points on the Minnesota Timberwolves in a sweep of their first-round Western Conference series.

The Mavericks' 115-102 road victory in the Game 3 clincher on Sunday left the T-Wolves to ponder their sixth straight first-round exit while the Target Center maintenance staff removed Dallas's skid marks from the court. Why didn't Minnesota use its vaunted zone defense to thwart the Mavs? " Dallas shot before we could get it set up," said T-Wolves coach Flip Saunders. With such a helter-skelter, hurry-up offense, why didn't the Mavericks commit more than 27 turnovers in three games? "Because they shoot it too quick," said Minnesota guard Chauncey Billups.

You think? Dallas led by 18 points early in the fourth quarter yet refused to stop chucking, sometimes indiscriminately, thus allowing Minnesota to get back into the game. With his team clinging to a 106-101 lead and slightly less than two minutes remaining, the Mavs' Steve Nash found himself steaming into the frontcourt with the ball. Surely what any heady point guard would do is pull up, run a set and milk the clock. Just not a heady point guard who plays for the Mavs. Only a few seconds into the possession Nash let fly a three. It connected, and that was basically the ball game.

What were you thinking, Steve?

"I was thinking dagger," said Nash.

Here's another distinguishing Dallas moment, from the third quarter of Sunday's game: Swingman Michael Finley rebounded a Minnesota miss and headed up-court. Nash, putative leader of the fast break, called for the ball. Farther ahead Dirk Nowitzki, who already had 31 points and would finish with a game-high 39, was also requesting the rock. Sorry, fellas. Finley took it all the way to the hole, drew a foul, and both Nash and Nowitzki rushed over to slap him on the butt.

See, for a team that needs to apply constant pressure, Finley's play was exactly right—as 7'1" Wang Zhizhi is learning. Wang passed up a couple of open looks in Game 3, which prompted Nash to confront him and frantically make a shooting motion with his left hand. ( Nash does not know how to say "Take the shot!" in Chinese.)

It was all more than the T-Wolves could handle. Although they didn't trumpet the fact before the series, Kevin Garnett & Co. desperately wanted to face Dallas (instead of the San Antonio Spurs) in the first round, theorizing that the Mavs were soft defensively and bound to fizzle because of an overdependence on perimeter shooting. But the Dallas D was good enough; Minnesota had no luck working the ball inside. "We got swept," said a downtrodden Garnett on Sunday, "by a team we thought we could beat."

At 25, the 6'11" Garnett is a splendid player, routinely listed as one of the five best in the league, which raises an interesting question: Is he better than the 23-year-old Nowitzki, who made his first All-Star team this season? Although they weren't always going head-to-head, it's impossible to have watched this series and not concluded that Nowitzki was at least as good as KG, even taking into account the blond bomber's superior supporting cast. Nowitzki scored 100 points in the three games (to Garnett's 72), shot 52.6% from the floor, made 8 of his 11 three-point attempts and 32 of his 36 free throws. He ignited Dallas in Game 3 by scoring in a variety of ways—a loping runner, a jump shot off a pick-and-drift-to-the-corner, a post-up jumper over veteran Sam Mitchell, a spin to the basket off a lob entry from Nash and, of course, two conventional threes. By the end of the first quarter Nowitzki had 17 points, and Dallas had a 40-28 lead it never surrendered, no matter how hard it tried.

In this his fourth NBA season Nowitzki has become that rare 7-footer to whom no one says, Get under the basket where you belong, you big lug. Indiana Pacers scout Al Menendez compares Nowitzki's face-the-basket talent with—gulp!—Larry Bird's. Philadelphia 76ers swingman Aaron McKie says that Nowitzki has changed his perception about how and where 7-footers should play, calling him "a big man of the new millennium." Nowitzki looks utterly at home on the perimeter, his jumper a thing of beauty whether he unleashes it off the dribble or standing still. W�rzburg, his Bavarian birthplace, is the town where Wilhelm R�ntgen discovered the X-ray in 1895. Nowitzki's marksmanship would make R�ntgen glow with pride.