Dwight Howard is just one team away from completing the dangerous and powerful Southeast Division Infinity Gauntlet. Now a member of the Washington Wizards, he’s set to play for his sixth franchise in eight seasons. He was asked about his career arc during his Wizards introductory press conference Monday, and his response made NBA fans collectively hurl tomatoes at their phone screens:
It’s not solely the quote that’s cringeworthy. If another NBA player, like Nick Young, would’ve said this, it might have come across as a humor-adjacent riff on a complicated career. The most noteworthy part would have been the implication that a player was “stung” by his former team. But these words were said by Dwight Howard.
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Howard has a history of responding to every situation with a corny joke. It doesn’t matter whether he’s asked about a poor performance, team turmoil, or jilted fans; he’ll crack a smile and hit an unamused audience with C-grade open-mic material. At his first (and only) media day as a member of the Hornets, Howard dodged a question about athletes visiting President Donald Trump’s White House by telling reporters that if the Hornets win the title he’d be willing to visit the “Dwight House.” Ten months and a roster of alienated teammates later, here we are again.
There was a moment when I thought Howard was on track to becoming a fan favorite. In 2007, the former no. 1 overall draft pick lost a slam-dunk contest he should’ve won, as he slapped a sticker of his smiling face a few inches from the top of the backboard mid-dunk. The next year, he won the dunk contest by donning a Superman cape and jumping high enough to hurl the ball through the rim. Big men normally don’t fare well in dunk contests, but Howard threw down dunks that nobody had ever done—that nobody had ever thought to do—and did it with a smile on his face. He was creative, spectacularly physically gifted, and charismatic. He held a league yearning for talented big men on his extremely muscular shoulders.
Fast-forward 10 years, and Howard is almost certainly the least popular player in the NBA. It’s not just that most NBA fans dislike him; I can’t imagine anyone self-identifying as a Howard fan. The most likable thing about him at this point is that he’s largely irrelevant; if his teams had a serious chance of contending, his annoying tendencies would turn into national talking points. Instead, Howard has taken to playing a 1990s style of basketball for teams vying to squeak into the bottom of the Eastern Conference playoff bracket.
How did we get here? That’s the oddest part.
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Part of the reason fans almost universally dislike Dwight Howard is that it seems like every NBA player who has ever met Dwight Howard dislikes Dwight Howard. He’s gotten into on-court fights with teammates (here’s Steve Nash telling him to stop complaining and get open), former teammates (here’s Kobe Bryant calling him soft, among other mean things), and opponents (here is Kevin Durant calling him an extremely mean thing).
Let’s run through every stop of Howard’s career:
- Dwight’s Magic career (2004-05 to 2011-12) ended about as awkwardly as possible. He famously interrupted a Stan Van Gundy interview in which the head coach was stunningly honest about how Howard wanted him fired. Dwight hugged SVG and denied what Van Gundy said to the media. Then, after Van Gundy was canned, Howard demanded a trade anyway, making a point to say that Orlando’s players were guys “no one wanted” on his way out.
- With the Lakers (2012-13), Howard paired up with Kobe Bryant. That didn’t work out. Bryant has since explained why he disliked Howard, saying that the big man seemed “uncomfortable” around people who were trying to win. Maybe this isn’t all Howard’s fault; Kobe is notoriously hard to please. Regardless, Dwight chose to leave in free agency a year after being traded to Los Angeles. These Lakers weren’t so fun, after all.
- Howard’s stint with the Rockets (2013-14 to 2015-16) also saw him share a locker room with a star guard, and that situation went just as poorly. Calvin Watkins reported that Dwight’s relationship with James Harden was “cordially bad,” noting that the two players initially attempted to be friends, but that things went downhill. Others described the acrimony as worse: Sports Illustrated’s Lee Jenkins reported that incoming Rockets players were advised to pick a side between Harden and Howard; ESPN’s Tim MacMahon reported that Harden told Rockets management to bench Howard in favor of Clint Capela.
- Dwight joined the Hawks (2016-17) in what was branded as a homecoming, the center’s equivalent of LeBron’s return to Ohio. It didn’t go nearly as well. ESPN’s Zach Lowe said the Hawks soured on Howard’s habit of giving pep talks before games, then giving little effort on the court. (“It can’t just be the corny jokes,” Lowe said, with regard to why every team quickly begins to hate Howard.) Dwight wore out his Atlanta welcome within a few months. More than one Hawks player reportedly cheered when Howard got traded, and Dennis Schröder said Howard played hard only “four games each year.”
- Finally, there was Howard’s time with the Hornets (2017-18). Brendan Haywood, an NBA veteran turned analyst, said Charlotte’s locker room simply “did not like” Howard and grew “sick and tired of his act.” Unsurprisingly, Dwight got traded after just one season. There haven’t been any elaborations from active Hornets players to date explaining why they disliked Howard. Give it time.
Howard’s career follows a pattern: Every year now, he shows up in a new place. And every year now, the people in the city he goes to hope that Howard will be different. But eventually, he reveals himself to be the same old Dwight, and a path toward his inevitable departure begins.
Maybe people hate Dwight Howard because he loves snakes. He has 20 of them. He’s been featured in Reptiles Magazine. The crew from the Animal Planet show Tanked gave Howard a special tank for his boa constrictors.
Look, I don’t want to say anything bad about people who own snakes—they own snakes, for one, and can show up to my doorstep with snakes whenever they feel like—but there’s a reason no cultures have a snake god who’s helpful or nice. People tend to agree that there’s something inherently evil about snakes. Maybe try petting a dog? They’re soft and friendly.
Maybe people hate Howard because he insists he’s good at a specific type of basketball, even though he isn’t. The man loves post-ups. He wanted the Lakers to play inside out when he was in L.A., feeding him in the post on non-pick-and-roll plays. Nash elaborated after the season. Howard later complained about his role with the Rockets, saying the team should have given him the ball to establish an “inside attack” and that Harden was “ball-dominant.”
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The first problem with Dwight’s demands is that no team runs its offense through post-ups anymore. It’s 2018. The NBA is a 3-point league now. Remember the Rockets? The second problem is that, well, Howard already gets a lot of post touches. He led the league in them in 2016-17, per SportVU, and was third in post-up touches last season. But the biggest problem is that Dwight is bad at scoring out of the post. Thirty-four players got two or more post touches per game last season; Howard ranked 29th among them in points per possession, according to NBA.com. Meanwhile, Howard ranked fourth in the league in points per possession as a cutter and has always been one of the best roll men in the league.
You know how coal mining is outdated, awful for the planet, and dangerous for the people who do it … and yet there are still coal miners demanding that we subsidize coal mining instead of more financially and environmentally sound energy sources? That’s Dwight Howard.
Or maybe people hate Howard because he loves candy. He loves it so much that he almost destroyed his nervous system, eating the sugar equivalent of 24 candy bars a day. Doctors had to order him to stop. Dwight still enjoys a treat now and then; SI’s Jenkins noted last year that when his five kids (from five different mothers) are in town, they drink slushies and watch movies together, because the kids’ “taste in food and cinema is not much different from their father’s.”
But why would you hate somebody for eating candy? In fact, why would you hate a person for any of these reasons? It’s this lack of an obvious explanation that makes the Howard hate unique. Other disliked sports figures (Lance Armstrong, A-Rod, LeBron post-Decision, etc.) tend to have a crisis moment when they become disliked: a stunning controversy or scandal; a prominent failure on a major stage; a ruthless free-agency decision that alienated a fan base. With Howard, however, there’s been nothing of the sort. He’s never had a moment when he’s changed.
And that’s precisely the problem. He still loves the same things children love. He still believes his corny jokes will win people over. And he’s the same way when it comes to basketball: He clings to the belief that playing an antiquated style will lead his team to glory, even as the game passes him by. He believes that every new stop is the one in which he will be proved right.
Normally, fans love athletes with individuality, but Howard’s individuality is annoying. And annoying isn’t a quality that an athlete can apologize for, thus setting the stage for a redemption story. No lone joke or botched-team-chemistry scenario would single-handedly ruin a player’s reputation; over the years, though, Dwight Howard has become the NBA’s hangnail.
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHY
