The order, like most things in life, is a matter of a personal preference.

Kenny Smith calls Dwyane Wade and Goran Dragic the NBA’s third-best backcourt. Charles Barkley has Toronto’s DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry third, behind Golden State’s Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson and Portland’s Damian Lillard and CJ McCollom.

Wherever you rank them, this much is clear: Wade/Dragic and DeRozan/Lowry warrant being part of any discussion of the league’s best half-dozen starting guard combos.

And whichever duo plays better over the next two weeks has a good chance to win this Heat-Raptors second-round playoff series that begins Tuesday night in Toronto.

All four guards enter this matchup off the emotional exhilaration of Game 7 wins. But DeRozan and Lowry aren’t playing at anything close to peak efficiency.

DeRozan averaged 17.9 points against Indiana in the first round but shot only 32 percent from the field, the lowest field-goal percentage in any round of the playoffs by a player averaging at least 15 points per game since Stephen Jackson in 2007, according to Elias. He scored 30 in Game 7 but shot 10 for 32; since 1957, no player who took at least 30 shots in a playoff game shot a worse percentage.

Lowry, meanwhile, shot under 40 percent from the field in all seven games against Indiana and finished the series at 32 percent, including 7-of-43 on threes, while averaging 13.9 points.

The Raptors thus became only the second team in NBA playoff history to win a series despite their top two scorers shooting below 33 percent.

Wade (19 points per game, 47 percent shooting) and Dragic (14.1, 42.4) had more efficient first-round series than their Toronto counterparts, with Wade carrying the Heat in the decisive minutes of Game 6, and Dragic shaking off a mid-series shooting slump to catapult the Heat to a win in Game 7.

“Goran Dragic is my hero,” Chris Bosh tweeted Monday.

The NBA is a relatively small circle, and Wade and Dragic are linked in different ways to their Toronto counterparts.

DeRozan told The Herald’s Ethan Skolnick at the All-Star Game that he “stole the pump fake” from Wade and still considers Wade his toughest cover.

“D-Wade is one of them guys I’ve had so much respect for,” DeRozan said. “Even when I was young, he always gave me a lot of advice, year after year of him seeing me grow as a player. That gave me a lot of confidence early on, to see someone you watched growing up give you insight on everything. … That’s my guy, him and Kobe [Bryant].”

DeRozan averaged more points against the Heat both this season (29.3, on 48.8 percent shooting, in four games) and during his career (21.0, in 24 games) than against any other Eastern Conference team.

Wade, meantime, played three games against Toronto, averaging 18.3 points and 44.9 percent shooting.

DeRozan “reminds me of me,” Wade said earlier this season.

And DeRozan isn’t the only Raptors perimeter player who grew up admiring Wade. Norman Powell, Toronto’s impressive rookie from UCLA, told Toronto media on Sunday night that Wade is “one of the guys that I looked up to, modeled my game after.”

Powell and the Heat’s Josh Richardson were perhaps the NBA’s most impressive second-round rookies this season.

There also is a link between Lowry and Dragic, who were teammates for more than a year in Houston. When Lowry missed 15 late-season games due to injury in March and April of 2012, Dragic seized on that, won Western Conference Player of the Week and parlayed that into a four-year, $30 million deal with Phoenix months later.

Both players shot poorly in the Heat-Raptors season series --- Lowry 33.9 percent while averaging 16.8 points in four games, Dragic 38.9 percent while averaging 11.0.

This series has plenty of other interesting matchups. Among them:

• The battle between 7-foot centers Hassan Whiteside and Jonas Valanciunas. Whiteside averaged 13.7 points, 11.7 rebounds and 4.7 blocks in three games against Toronto. Valanciunas averaged 15.3 points, 9.3 rebounds and 1.3 blocks in three games against Miami.

Whiteside defended Valanciunas pretty effectively --- one spectacular Whiteside block on a Valanciunas spin move made the rounds on social media. But Valanciunas snuck free for layups when Whiteside left him to defend DeRozan and Lowry on penetrations.

“One thing I think a lot of teams know is I’m good at getting to the basket,” DeRozan said after Toronto’s 112-104 win on March 12 in Air Canada Center, a game that Wade missed. “So, teams like Miami that have got shot blockers, they’re going to try to bring the shot blocker over. So, I just told our bigs: relocate. Try to find an open spot and I’m going to try to find you every time.”

• The Joe Johnson/DeMarre Carroll small forward matchup. Toronto gave Carroll a four-year, $60 million deal after his breakout season with Atlanta, but he was limited to 26 games, largely because of knee surgery, and hasn’t played especially well in the playoffs (8.6 points, 39.6 percent shooting).

Johnson has been somewhat better than Carroll so far this postseason (10.7 points, 45.9 percent shooting) but hasn’t had a breakout game. He scored 28 in that Heat overtime loss in Toronto.

• The battle of the stretch fours. Luol Deng and Patrick Patterson are ideally suited for the contemporary NBA game, which values power forwards with range.

Deng’s 20 three-pointers (on 51.3 percent shooting) easily leads all power forwards in the playoffs, and Patterson’s 10 (on 41.7 percent shooting) ranks third, narrowly behind Serge Ibaka.

The Heat won the first game between the teams this season (96-76 on Nov. 8), but Toronto won the next three. Though Toronto won three of four in the season series, Wade missed one game and Joe Johnson was with the Heat for only one game.

“Every game we played Toronto, except one where we had some guys out, we were able to play them down to the wire,” Deng said.

Twitter: @flasportsbuzz