Dwight Howard wants us to believe he can still change

Dwight Howard is apparently smart enough to notice how poorly he is thought of in NBA circles, but also not smart enough to figure out how to change that. Accordingly, the Dwight Howard image rehabilitation tour is becoming a bit of an annual spectacle.

This summer, Howard has already been shuffled from the Hornets to the Nets, who promptly waived him, to the Wizards. Now, he’s trying to make nice and prove that he can be a valuable member of the team and still has a place in the modern NBA and that all those things about him being a locker room nuisance are false, or at least exaggerated.

So here’s the latest news coming from Howard’s camp, via Candace Buckner of the Washington Post: he’d like to play until he’s 40 and “wants to evolve into Anthony Davis, into Kevin Durant, but his own version of that,” according to his trainer, Justin Zormelo, which as far as I can tell, is not an alias for Howard himself. These are the right things to say, but I don’t know who would be foolish enough to believe them.

It’s really unclear what Howard becoming his own version of Davis or Durant would even entail. Becoming more versatile defensively? Getting a jumper? Even in his days as the best defensive player in the NBA, Howard was never great at guarding players on the perimeter, often seeming stiff and less athletic than he actually is after being caught in a switch. And with regards to getting a jumper, Howard has never been able to knock down free throws with any consistency, let alone shots from outside the paint. It’s not unprecedented for a big man to add a jumper deep into their career — see Brook Lopez, for example — but Lopez was at least always a consistent free throw shooter, which is often a good predictor of whether a player’s form is sound. Howard’s is not.

In a way, Dwight Howard has nothing to prove. He was the best big man in the NBA for several years, led an otherwise merely okay Orlando Magic team to the NBA Finals, and won Defensive Player of the Year three years in a row. Howard could have retired a few years ago and still been an undoubted Hall-of-Famer. Yet, despite all that, Howard still has much to prove. No one believes that he can still actually provide value in the modern NBA. It’s not merely that his game seems anachronistic, and that his still solid numbers seem ultimately hollow, but that he has burned innumerable bridges and the fact that his presence has not actually decisively improved a team in many years now. It does not seem coincidental that the Rockets improved after he left in the summer of 2016.

The thing is, we’ve heard all this from him before. Howard has long talked about ways he will improve his game, ways that he will become more multidimensional while putting ego and childishness aside, but he remains the same player he was nearly a decade ago, just worse and much less valuable. If Howard can become a 32-year-old Anthony Davis or start to shoot like Durant, that’d be cool to watch, but you’d be a fool to bet on it actually happening. And sure, I imagine that, considering his physique and athleticism, Howard could feasibly play until he is 40. What I can’t imagine, though, is that there will be teams wanting him around each of the next eight years.