With brakes on, you get some deceleration from the tires, but you also get a nose down pitching moment. With OEI aerodynamic braking is still effective, more effective alone than braking is alone. The two together should give you maximum braking effort, but if you allow the nose to fall too much, then you may be relying only on the less efficient rubber braking or the amount of aft cyclic required to allow aerodynamic braking may get you into aft tip clearance problems.
Whether you have brakes on or off you should fly your profile to zero speed if the pad is small. If you can't do that, then I imagine just putting the mains on and keeping the nose up gives you more braking distance, since you may be able to put the nose over the edge...just don't go too far.
Sudden OEI short final to a pad I'd say overshoot is your best bet 99% of the time. Better to set up the approach you want than accept what you're doing.
Of course, all of the above was not type specific for anything. I fly an H46 where your fuselage attitude is a constant angle to the rotor planes. Thus, nose down is much worse for us...running on low speed with nose slightly up is best.