For the first game on what will be an extremely emotional Friday NBA on ESPN doubleheader, the undermanned Dallas Mavericks will participate in a battle of Texas, visiting the 29-18 Houston Rockets in the Toyota Center at 7:30 p.m. ET.

Perhaps the biggest storyline heading into this one is the absence of Dallas’s lifeblood-giver as Luka Doncic is to miss this game due to the All-Star rolling his ankle in a practice to prepare for tonight’s game. Confirmed as recent as this afternoon, the manageable ailment will take two weeks to heal. The Mavs have been down this rocky road earlier this year and did pretty well while Doncic was away tending to another ankle injury to the same leg, going a respectable 2-2 with wins coming against the Houston Rockets and Milwaukee Bucks.

And of course, they’ll surely miss the scoring aficionado’s 28.8 ppg., but they have managed in beating both of those elite teams without Doncic in the starting lineup. Kristaps Porzingis took on the challenge of leading his Mavericks in all the box score statistics without his fellow European frontcourt mate, averaging 16.8 points off a steadily-rising 39 percent shooting. It’s also worth adding that a year ago today, the announcement that Porzingis was being dealt to the Dallas Mavericks in a trade with the New York Knicks was made, amidst a flurry of drama and mistrust with the Knicks organization’s direction and desire to build a contender.

But if they’re to say “no Luka, no problem” at night’s end, they’ll have to do so by mapping out the blueprint that multiple teams have done so in beating the Rockets, which explains one, very simple rule: Double/trap/Blitz James Harden when the ball sticks at the top of the key. Regardless of Harden’s now hideous season (and almost career)-low three-point shooting numbers at 22.5 percent from deep, he’s still James Harden and it’s probably only a matter of time until he snaps out of his funk, so it’ll be up to all Dallas guards like Tim Hardaway Jr., Dorian Finney-Smith, Jalen Brunson and bigs like Porzingis and the newly-implemented Willie Cauley Stein to make a difference when switched onto him, that is if they decide to play Harden 1-on-1.

Still, he and Russell Westbrook will walk into Chicago in a couple of weeks as All-Stars, thanks to Westbrook’s picking up of Harden’s recent slack with his 35.5 ppg. in the last two games he’s played in. Houston has only won two out of their last five, with two recent losses coming by way of a loss to Utah in which Westbrook sat out on Monday and a consecutive loss to the Portland Trail Blazers, which saw Westbrook carry the load for backcourt rotation that looked despondent and uninterested after their shots stopped falling. Their core is also banged up since Clint Capela is forced to sit this one out with a heel injury.

In what has been an awkward year for both teams, (Dallas still working out the kinks of utilizing both KP and Doncic into the lineups before the playoffs begin and Houston trying to figure some new things out offensively so that their schemes don’t go stale) both Houston and Dallas are knotted in the West as it pertains to their record. And yet, it is the Dallas Mavericks that have the upper hand in the division when looking at the win differential, considering that they beat the Rockets earlier this year.

This will be the second these two Western factions see each other in the regular season and won’t see each other until after All-Star Weekend in the months of March and April so every win counts against a division rival, especially for these two streaky teams that are looking for some stability ahead of the All-Star Break.