In a career that started off so well before hitting the absolute depths of despair, Dwight Howard is now an NBA champion with the Los Angeles Lakers.
If you thought 2020 was going to be the year where Dwight Howard was going to become an NBA champion while accepting his role as a bit-part player as part of a Los Angeles Lakers organization he had once run away from before, you’re lying. Nobody saw this coming, it looked about as likely as a bat in a wet marking bringing a halt to the whole world for the guts of a year.
If Howard now being a champion was improbable, and really if you look at his last five years in the league it was absolutely that, then doing so as a, dare we say, liked member of a team featuring LeBron James and Anthony Davis seems downright ridiculous to type out. Yet here we are, Howard having come back from the brink.
America loves a redemption story, but this is up there with the most unexpected in recent memory. Certainly from a basketball perspective. It also ensures beyond any doubt, not that much existed anyway, that Howard will now go into the Hall of Fame someday. But how did we get to this point exactly?
It is unclear who deserves most of the credit for having Howard finally realize the league had changed and he would have to as well, but Howard himself, as well as James, would appear to be the two frontrunners. In LeBron’s case, here is another guy who was able to fall in line behind him, despite being some variation of washed, unruly or too selfish, or some combination of all three.
Rajon Rondo was captured his second ring while playing alongside James, despite looking like he’d be out of the league a couple of years ago. Turn those feelings up to 10 when it comes to Howard, who as recently as three years ago looked like he was going to endure one of the saddest instances of slipping out of the NBA for a former franchise cornerstone.
The first split from the Lakers was bad, back when Howard felt he wasn’t being featured enough. This after his painful exit from the Orlando Magic, where he had made his name and led them to the finals off the back of three straight Defensive Player of the Year awards. Then came his time with the Houston Rockets and a relationship with James Harden that soured.
Time changes the perception of all, and although Harden came away from that breakup in a much better light, his subsequent failure to coexist with Chris Paul means that perhaps Howard was on to something. Harden is still one of the best players in the league, and Howard is not that. But you have to wonder what Harden would give to be a champion now. Perhaps not as much as we think.
After that, there was still time for stops with the Atlanta Hawks, Charlotte Hornets, Brooklyn Nets and Washington Wizards. What we chose to forget as a collective, mostly because Howard has been hard to root for since about 2010, is that Howard actually put up good numbers with the Hawks and Hornets.
Nobody cared because neither team was very good and because the Hornets are the Hornets, but Howard could be counted upon to get you roughly 14 points and 10 boards a night. At every turn, however, the whispers would soon start up that he was bad for the locker room. By the time he got to the Wizards, where he managed only nine games, a mysterious gluteal injury on top of the poisonous aroma around his name meant that a tragic end to his career looked likely.
Dwight Howard’s return to the Los Angeles Lakers
Many were surprised to see Howard go back to the Los Angeles Lakers, not least because a franchise with championship aspirations does not need unwelcome locker room distractions. Alongside Rondo and JaVale McGee, and later J.R. Smith, Dion Waiters and Markieff Morris, the Lakers somehow assembled the kind of roster that could single-handedly keep Twitter’s content stream alive.
Amazingly over the course of the regular season, and then once in the bubble, Howard did little to rock the boat. He cheered his repaired gluteal off on the bench, got involved in LeBron’s chalk-throwing theatrics, and played in whatever capacity was asked of him. Sometimes that was not at all. On other occasions, it was to start games.
In the NBA Finals, it was to start games, like in Game 5 when Howard had two points and two rebounds in 15 minutes for the Los Angeles Lakers. That was just it though, the final obstacle for Howard to redeem himself. He no longer had to care about the points or any of the basic numbers really. Just run the floor, set screens, defer always to James and Davis, and generally get out of the way unless starting a fight with Jimmy Butler.
It worked. Howard cared less about himself and did everything that was asked of him by the team throughout the whole season. It led to him being a small part of a championship roster, but it was about much more than that.
It finally allowed him to wash away all of the ill-will and dislike that multiple fan bases around the league had for him. It only took 11 years and a trip around the NBA to get back to the Los Angeles Lakers, and to a title that seemed certain years ago but means more now.