I never liked Dallas as a playoff team...at all. Pretty much a three-man offensive team with Howard, Nowitzki, and Terry, as Kidd won't even crack double digits on most nights nowadays. As an aside, I hated it when the sixth man award was given to Terry--yeah he played off the bench and averaged 20 ppg, but come on, look at the guy who was starting in front of him--Antoine Wright of all people. Terry also basically played starter minutes off the bench, and the talent disparity between he and Wright is so great that Terry basically had no reason to be coming off the bench other than to provide a spark (I guess that's what it is though). And their role players are stocked with some solid guys (Barea, Bass, Singleton), clueless youngsters (Hollins, Green) and offensively deficient "defenders" (Wright, George). Not really a recipe conducive to success, and it will catch up to them this series.
The Nuggets on the other hand are also peaking and on a hot streak (as an aside, is it just me, or do they seem to have many blowouts where they win by large margins? I'm not just saying this because they beat Nawlins by 58; if I recall they also beat the Thunder by 40+ while scoring 163, and they've had many 30 pt wins). They are a team chock full of athletes and serviceable big men (the Nene-Martin-Anderson trio is actually quite underrated), and while their gunning selfishness made them lose easily last year, this year they're stabilized by Billups, who has dramatically increased their team defense tenfold and made them more disciplined on offense just by his mere presence. And that bench--Anderson, Smith and Kleiza are quite lethal, and they actually have good perimeter defenders (Carter, Billups, Jones). So sorry for overlooking this series, but I think they can match up well with the Lakers. Nugs in 5 most likely