Dwight Howard was officially introduced as the newest member of the Washington Wizards on Monday. Howard inked a two-year, $10.9 million deal that includes, somehow, a player option for Howard next season after he was bought out by the Brooklyn Nets following a trade sending Timofey Mozgov to Charlotte.
Howard has now technically been on six teams in seven years since departing Orlando for Los Angeles in 2012. His inability to stick with a franchise since leaving his first NBA home has become almost comical, with each team that signs him hoping they’ll be able to coax the production of Orlando Dwight back out of the former All-NBA center, but instead being left frustrated with his presence in the locker room.
He famously clashed with Kobe Bryant in L.A., which many chalked up to a Kobe problem, but then had a similar rift form with James Harden in Houston. His one-year stints in Atlanta and Charlotte saw him get traded unceremoniously for worse contracts simply to get him out of town, although the issues there seemed to be slow-building rather than the major clashes he had in Houston and L.A.
All the while, Howard has produced, averaging double-doubles every stop of the way, battling through back issues to continue to be fairly productive (albeit not nearly as dominant as he once was) on the floor. That production keeps giving hope to teams that they can change him, and Dwight is always willing to say the right things at the start of his tenure. He’s famously said he “wants to change” the narrative around him prior to his stops in Atlanta and Charlotte, and has done so again ahead of his Wizards career.
However, there’s another familiar refrain that Howard belted out at Monday’s press conference, when he insisted his plan was to be a Wizard for the rest of his career.
Dwight Howard on Washington: "I plan to be here until I retire.”
— Candace Buckner (@CandaceDBuckner) July 23, 2018
Dwight Howard goes into a long soliloquy when reminiscing about his career.
And ended it by repeating this: "This city, this team, is a place where I want to end my career."
— Candace Buckner (@CandaceDBuckner) July 23, 2018
As Nick Whalen of Rotowire noted on Twitter, this is straight out of the Dwight press conference playbook, dating back seven years.
— Nick Whalen (@wha1en) July 23, 2018
Howard has always been good at saying the right thing to the press, but rarely do things pan out as originally planned. Any wonder if he comes prepared with scripted answers for questions was swept away by this answer he offered that I assume he thought would play like a Muhammad Ali-type quip, but instead reads as a painfully forced and scripted effort.
Asked about his recent travels the past few years, Howard has a ready-made answer: “I learned Magic for eight years. Went to La-La Land. Worked for a while with Rockets. Learned to fly with some Hawks. Got stung by the Hornets. And it all taught me how to be a Wizard.”
— David Aldridge (@davidaldridgedc) July 23, 2018
And so, the saga of Dwight Howard enters another chapter, with the introductory paragraph the same as every other. There’s something incredible about Howard’s Sisyphean journey through the second half of his career. A man so intent on saying the right thing but never putting into action the actual changes necessary to produce the right results dooming himself to repeat the same climb over-and-over with team after team until his Hall of Fame career comes to its end.
