Weathered the storm without Dirk

The sun never seems to stop shining here in SoCal. Storm clouds are about as foreign as fried chicken joints in health-conscious Santa Monica. (Not that you can’t find them in other parts of LA. We feasted at Roscoe’s House of Chicken’ n Waffles in Hollywood last night.)

The skies were pretty murky playing four games without Dirk Nowitzki. The MVP is back. We could be seeing the next one in a few hours.

“We weathered one storm and another is coming tonight in the form of the Lakers and Kobe Bryant,” Avery Johnson said with a smile. “That’s the one thing about storms, they keep coming. Yesterday was pretty sunny because, guess what, we didn’t have a game.”

The tag-team approach on Bryant starts with Josh Howard and continues with Eddie Jones, Devean George, Jason Kidd and maybe some Antoine Wright. Johnson doesn’t want Howard to spend too much time on Kobe because it tends to wear him out on the other end.

The offense ran through Howard with Nowitzki out and likely won’t change as long as Nowitzki is less than 100 percent.