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NBA: 30 best careers from players who skipped college

By Josh Cornelissen

LeBron James, Miami Heat and Kobe Bryant, Los Angeles Lakers. Photo by Victor Decolongon/Getty Images
LeBron James, Miami Heat and Kobe Bryant, Los Angeles Lakers. Photo by Victor Decolongon/Getty Images /
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Dwight Howard
Dwight Howard, Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images /

30 best careers from players who skipped college – 5. Dwight Howard

Many, if not most players, who made the jump from high school to the NBA ended up playing for powerhouse high schools, choosing them specifically for their ability to vault them into professional basketball careers. Dwight Howard instead attended and played for the same tiny Christian school he had attended his entire life, where his mother taught.

He ended up not needing the boost of a prominent school, not when he sprouted to nearly seven feet tall with a powerful NBA frame by the time he finished high school. Firmly rooted with a loving family, he looked like a can’t-miss pick, and the Orlando Magic obliged by selecting him first overall in the 2004 NBA Draft.

For whatever warts and idiosyncrasies he displayed over the course of his career, the Magic’s draft evaluators were not wrong. Howard has easily had the best career of anyone in his draft class, with nearly 38 more win shares than second-place Andre Iguodala. He was the two-way linchpin of an Orlando Magic team that reached the NBA Finals in 2009. In 2020 he finally won a ring as a member of the Los Angeles Lakers, the team that stopped the Magic short of a title in 2009.

Howard has been named to an All-NBA team eight times, leading the league in rebounding five times and blocks twice. Five times Howard was an All-Defense player and won Defensive Player of the Year three times. Since the Defensive Player of the Year award was instituted in 1983, only two players (Ben Wallace and Dikembe Mutombo) have won it at least three times; they combined for eight All NBA teams.

Howard has proven to be enigmatic, and he outwore his welcome on a number of teams, even ones he had just joined. He spent the first eight seasons of his career with the Orlando Magic; he changed teams seven times in the next nine seasons. Winning a title as a bench player comfortable with his role did a lot to rehabilitate his image.

Any way you slice it, Howard has been one of the very best prep-to-pro players in league history, and likewise one of the best players of his generation. He is in his 16th season and still contributing to a winning team.