For Openers, There Would Be None Better Than Mavericks

Lakers vs. Mavericks, a possible playoff preview?

Could this actually be the reward for one of the all-time worst defenses of a championship by an intact team? Is Phil Jackson’s karma that strong? What have the Lakers done to deserve this? It’s like bringing home a report card with straight D’s and your mom taking you out for ice cream.

You know how teams say they want to face certain opponents as late as possible? It’s the exact opposite for the Lakers when it comes to the Dallas Mavericks. They can’t wait to play these guys. They’re in such complete control of them, I think I saw a few Mavericks washing the Lakers’ cars before they boarded the team bus to take them out of Staples Center

I can’t wait for them to play the Mavericks either. Get these guys out of here, ASAP. Is there a more heartless, softer team in contention for the playoffs?

Whenever I call my buddies and say, “Look at these frauds,” they don’t even need to ask which game I’m watching. The Mavericks must be on TV.

They jumped out to the best record in the league in November, yet no one who doesn’t fly aboard the team’s 757 gives them a chance to win the championship. Now they’re facing shaky prospects of escaping the first round. Tuesday night’s 108-99 victory by the Lakers dropped the Mavericks into a tie with San Antonio for first place in the Midwest Division. And Dallas still has to play a game in San Antonio. The Spurs are going to pass them for the division title and the Mavericks are going to slip to the No. 3 seeding in the Western Conference. If the Lakers maintain their place in the sixth spot, they’ll face the Mavericks in the first round. And they’ll win that series in five games, max.

Dallas would have homecourt advantage. Big deal. The Lakers won in American Airlines Center last week. One win there and the Mavericks would be forced to win at Staples Center.

They say the war puts sports in perspective? Well how about this historical framework: the Mavericks haven’t beaten the Lakers in Los Angeles since before the first Persian Gulf War.

Yes, the Mavericks’ latest woes have come without the injured Michael Finley. But they were winning games against anyone that mattered even when he was in the lineup. Why do the Mavericks struggle against the big boys? I’ll use Dirk Nowitzki’s analysis: “We’re a jump-shooting team. If we want to beat teams, we’ve got to shoot the ball well. We don’t really have any inside players.”

Conventional wisdom says it’s too hard to win all of your games from the outside. Tuesday night, the Lakers beat the Mavericks in most unconventional fashion. They did it with Rick Fox making fallaway jump shots over double-teams. They did it with their reserves outscoring their Dallas counterparts, 31-24.

And they did it with close-to-minimal output from Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. Put it this way, through three quarters Fox had more points than O’Neal and Bryant combined.

Bryant couldn’t make so much as a layup, then he made a 65-foot shot that didn’t count after the buzzer sounded to end the third quarter. He finished with 14 points on four-of-16 shooting.

About the only intrigue to a Laker-Maverick matchup is to see which way Dallas Coach Don Nelson will choose to defend O’Neal. Tuesday the method was to swarm him with three defenders whenever he got the ball, grab him even without the ball, and foul him before he could get into the act of shooting. He took only 14 shots, made six of them and clanged four of his six free throws for 14 points.

Not only was this the first game in more than a year that neither Bryant nor O’Neal led the team in scoring, neither of them could crack the top four.

If the Lakers do play the Mavericks in the first round, then the switch to the best-of-seven format will definitely be in L.A.’s favor. The Mavericks are capable of winning one game at home straight-up and they could easily have a hot shooting game and take another one. In a best-of-five that would leave them only one victory -- which could come down to one shot or one questionable call -- from winning the series. But it’s hard to imagine the Mavericks beating the Lakers four times in seven games.

A strange thing happened in the second quarter Tuesday night.

The Lakers had a lineup of Jannero Pargo, Samaki Walker, Devean George, Derek Fisher and Robert Horry on the court. That’s right -- with the outcome in question, O’Neal and Bryant were on the bench. You’ve got a better chance of going to a golf tournament and seeing a hole-in-one than attending a Laker game and witnessing that scenario. But the Lakers scored eight unanswered points to take a four-point lead.

George is starting to offer justification for that $18.5-million contract the Lakers signed him to last summer. He had 15 points Sunday against Phoenix -- his best scoring output in five months -- and followed that Tuesday with 21. He seemed to be everywhere when the Lakers raced to a double-digit lead in the fourth quarter, flying in for rebounds and firing them back into the hoop.

“It’s going to take more than Shaq and Kobe for us to win a championship and we know that,” Fox said. “When the opportunities present themselves, we have to execute the game plan.”

The plan should be for the Lakers to finish sixth, because the fraudulent Mavericks look like the Lakers’ best chance to advance in the playoffs.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com.