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It's time to talk about Dallas again.

You remember the Mavs, right? The team that has the league's third-best record. The team that has won 16 of its past 17 games? The team that, for some reason, absolutely nobody is talking about right now?

Yeah, those guys.

Last season, you'll recall, they accomplished a similar feat, winning 15 straight games after the break against a soft stretch of schedule while my Power Rankings frowned in disapproval.

This year looks a little different. While the Mavs are only seventh in the current rankings, they're within a point of third. Look at the "rating" and not the ranking, and you'll see there are essentially seven teams as near-equals at the top, followed by a chasm separating No. 7 Dallas from No. 8 Philadelphia and the rest of the league.

Similar to last year, Dallas again has an unusually bad point differential for its record, with just a plus-3.9 average scoring margin; their brethren in the contender community all are at plus-6.0 or better. The difference is that they're actually playing really well right now.

The point differential numbers are skewed a bit by a horrid 10-game stretch when Dirk Nowitzki was out of the lineup, but let's focus instead on the 20 games Dallas has played with Dirk and without Caron Butler -- essentially, the team they'll take into the playoffs. There, the résumé brightens considerably. The Mavs are 17-3 with a plus-6.3 average scoring margin in that stretch, a far cry from the series of smoke-and-mirrors wins last March. Although the opposition was soft, 12 of the 20 games were on the road.

The Mavs are a weird team that doesn't quite fit our construct of what a contender ought to look like -- there's only one star, and they have a bunch of little guards running around, and their only real small forward is 92 years old and was released by one of the worst teams in captivity.

But they're really effective. And while they give off the same "regular-season overachiever" vibe that Chicago does in the East, one would prefer to have a more valid empirical reason for dismissing a team's chances.

Which takes us to the first big question in today's Western Conference FAQ: Can Dallas catch San Antonio? Jason Terry said it was doable, and Tony Parker's injury undoubtedly throws fuel on the fire. So …


Can Dallas catch San Antonio? Standing six games back with 23 to play, the Mavs have their work cut out for them, even with Parker out two to four weeks with a calf strain. (And given Gregg Popovich's history of valuing the big picture over the short term, you can bet it will be closer to four weeks than two before Parker returns). Dallas has only one game left against the Spurs, on March 18, so even with a win they have to make up five games in the rest of the slate.

Beating the Spurs in March would tie the season series, and making up the rest of the ground would probably allow Dallas to catch San Antonio in division record (one game behind if they win in March) and conference record (four back with a win in March), so that Dallas would probably, but not certainly, have the tiebreaker.

Five games back doesn't seem like much, but if San Antonio doesn't totally choke, then Dallas nearly has to run the table. Even sans Parker, San Antonio won't be bad -- George Hill can adequately fill in at the point, and Manu Ginobili and Gary Neal also can initiate the offense. The Spurs still have some big games left (twice against Miami and the Lakers, once against Boston), but even so, I have trouble seeing them doing any worse than 12-10 in the 22 non-Dallas games; most likely they'll do substantially better.

Take San Antonio's worst-case of 12-10 and you'll see the Mavs have to go 17-5; if the Spurs improve much on that 12-10 mark, it quickly becomes impossible for Dallas to catch them even with a win in March. Should San Antonio go 15-7, for instance, it requires Dallas to go 20-2 against a schedule that isn't chopped liver. And that's assuming a win on March 18; lose that one, and their hopes are toast.

So no, I don't think they can do it. But they could make it a bit more interesting along the way.