While trading notes this weekend with hoops fanatics, a curious inquiry was raised: Can the Miami Heat run?

The guy who asked is a Dallas Mavericks fan, and while others in on the exchange regarded the question with their snark sensors raised, the query had good intentions.

Miami coach Pat Riley should be asking the same question after Sunday night’s 99-85 thumping put his team in an 0-2 hole in their best-of-seven NBA Finals series against the Dallas Mavericks.

Going into the series, the Heat’s supposed strength was their strong and efficient half court offense, led by center Shaquille O’Neal, while Dallas’s depth and athleticism made it better suited for up-tempo play. Remarkably, with two games in the books, the Mavericks have used their surfeit of big men to neutralize O’Neal, and they are turning what was a highly anticipated series into a rout.

Miami certainly doesn’t fit the mold of a fast-break team. Their centers, O’Neal and Alonzo Mourning, are in their mid 30s and their point guards, Jason Williams and Gary Payton, are 30 and 37, respectively. (The Mavericks, by contrast, have only two part time players older than 30, center Erick Dampier and guard Adrian Griffin). Yet if there was ever a time for Miami to put the pedal to the medal, this is it.

Teams use the fast break to capitalize on their superior team speed or to prevent a stout defense from getting set. For Miami, it would be the latter. Dallas is bringing double teams from different directions every time Shaq receives the ball, which isn’t usual in and of itself. O’Neal routinely towers over opponents not named Yao Ming, so he must feel double teams even when eating lunch by himself. Miami usually punishes teams for these double teams by rotating the ball to an open man for a perimeter jump shot, or by using the threat of one to open a driving lane for slashing guard Dwyane Wade.

It’s a simple plan, but one that works wonders when Shaquille O’Neal is your center and Dwyane Wade is the guard taking the ball to the rim. But wade and the Heat’s perimeter shooters are failing their end of the deal. Forward Antoine Walker is shooting 42.9% from the field, Williams is shooting 38.1%, forward James Posey is bricking at a rate of 33.3%, and Payton brings up the rear at a ghastly 12.5%. With so little to fear from that aspect of the Heat offense, the Mavericks have been able to allow open shots and focus on Wade, who has been kept in check after a nearly otherworldly series against Detroit in the Eastern Conference Finals.

Wade has been held to 17-of-44 shooting in the series, a 38.6% rate. While O’Neal’s struggles get the headlines, the entire Miami offense has gone south two weeks too soon. After scoring 31 points in the first quarter of Game 1, the Heat offense – if you can call it that – scored 107 points in the next six periods against the much-improved Dallas defense. In all, the Heat have shot 63-of-148 from the floor and 12-of-37 from 3-point range in the two games.

So can the Heat run? The stats suggest that they can, more so than the age and construction of their team – squads with dominating centers aren’t usually fast-break oriented – might imply. The Heat finished 12th in the league this season in Pace Factor (a measure of possessions per game) at 93.8, but they’ve slowed to 91.8 in the playoffs. Picking up the tempo should lead to better shots, as it will prevent the Dallas defense from getting set in the half court. It would also open the floor for Wade to get to the hoop, which is what he does best.

Dallas may counter by going to a lineup of smaller, quicker players, but unless the Heat perimeter players begin nailing their shots at a respectable rate, and unless Miami power forward Udonis Haslem can play after injuring his shoulder in Game 2, Riley will need to rip up the offensive game plan and try something new.

The level and degree of domination shown by the Mavericks in Games 1 and 2 bring up another key point: Miami was built to win the Eastern Conference, where most of the elite teams – most notably Detroit, New Jersey, and Indiana – play a slower tempo and employ a more deliberate game plan. Chicago, an up-tempo team, played Miami close for four games before the Heat exploited the Bulls’ lack of interior presence to wins Games 5 and 6 of their first-round series.

More of the Western powers (like Phoenix and San Antonio) play up-tempo, and Miami has struggled against them in the regular season, getting swept by the Suns and the Spurs and splitting with the Los Angeles Clippers. Dallas’s two regular season wins over Miami, 103-90 in Florida and 102-76 in Texas, look more prescient than ever.

In constructing his team, Riley may have mistakenly thought that some parity was developing after years of a talent imbalance in the league favoring the Western Conference. Instead, the play in the first two games of the NBA Finals suggests that it isn’t the East as a conference that evened the score, but rather Detroit that ascended to the lofty standard of the Western Conference elite. The Pistons ran out of gas about a month too soon this year, and unless Miami wakes up in a hurry, this finals series could easily go down with the 2001 and 2002 models as big snoozes.

mjohnson@nysun.com