The plight of Dwight Howard

Once one of the league’s most dominant forces, Dwight Howard is moving on to his sixth team and fourth in four seasons.

A long time ago, in an NBA far, far away, Dwight Howard was an MVP candidate and the most dominant force in the league outside of LeBron James.

Actually, it wasn’t that long ago that Howard was winning three consecutive Defensive Player of the Year awards and leading the Orlando Magic past LeBron into the NBA Finals, but it sure feels that way given how the big man’s career has played out.

Once a fearsome beast, Howard is now a punchline and a guy who has been traded for Miles Plumlee and Timofey Mozgov in consecutive summers (amazingly, both times on June 20). He has gone from the Houston Rockets to the Atlanta Hawks to the Charlotte Hornets to the Brooklyn Nets since 2016.

Howard wasn’t even bad this past season in Charlotte. He put up 16.6 points and 12.5 rebounds per game, and the Hornets were a better team with him on the floor. He even had a 30/30 game! He’s not the player he once was, and he still insists on posting up too much when he’s not any good at it, but he was helpful.

Of course, it’s not that simple with Dwight, and we’re already getting reports of his teammates disliking him:

That’s why new Hornets president Mitch Kupchak dealt a useful Howard for a useless Mozgov (a Kupchak signee in 2016!), two future second-round picks and cash despite Howard’s expiring $23.82 million contract and Mozgov’s $16.72 million owed for 2019-20. Kupchak had already dealt with the Howard sideshow once in Los Angeles, and he clearly was determined not to deal with it again. The deal saves the Hornets a chunk of change this year, so they also have that going for them.

Things ending poorly with a team has become a theme with Howard. We can go all the way back to his time with the Orlando Magic and the awkward press conference with Stan Van Gundy:

Howard clashed with Kobe Bryant in LA and James Harden in Houston. Signing with his hometown Hawks was supposed to represent a fresh start, but his teammates hated him there, too. ESPN’s Zach Lowe and Kevin Arnovitz relayed multiple anecdotes on Lowe’s podcast after the Hawks traded Howard to the Hornets, with Arnovitz calling Howard “a downer” and Lowe saying he heard Hawks players were “screaming with jubilation into their phones” when the deal went down.

And now, exactly one year after Howard’s trade to the Hornets, Charlotte is flipping him to Brooklyn (though the deal can’t be consummated until after the July moratorium is over). It’s rather ironic given Howard’s initial trade demand to the Magic involved a desire to go to the Nets. Except now the Nets are a rebuilding team trying to claw their way back to relevancy rather than a team trying to make big splashes in order to make a championship run.

Howard is still “only” 32 years old and can help the Nets get back to relevancy, but he himself has become mostly irrelevant. Brooklyn has a promising 20-year-old center in Jarrett Allen already in place, so who knows how much Howard will see the floor. Will Howard cause a stink if he doesn’t get his desired minutes? Given his track record, he might cause a stink anyway in that young locker room no matter what happens.

Howard will likely move on to another team after his contract is up, if the Nets even keep him around all season. From there it’s hard to see any team making a long-term commitment to him, so we’ll probably continue to see him jump around from team to team the rest of his career.

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There will be debates about whether Howard should be a Hall of Famer, though the answer is definitely yes. It’s easy to forget just how dominant he was for a lengthy stretch at the beginning of his career. But despite remaining relatively productive, the perception of Howard has been trending down since leaving Orlando, aided by self-inflicted problems, a back injury and a league that has gone away from players of his ilk.

Howard’s legacy is a complicated one, which is a downer, just like the player himself.