Thanks to climate change, we’ll all be extinct sooner rather than later. But if Dwight Howard has anything to say about it, his basketball-related oblivion will have to be put on hold a little while longer. As the 30-year-old Rockets center moves further and further way from his dominant Orlando days, while the league simultaneously undergoes a seismic shift away from traditional big men like himself, the efficacy of his style of play in the modern NBA looks increasingly suspect.
It’s a reality of which Howard is keenly aware, as evidenced by a recent interview with Sam Amick of USA TODAY Sports in which he lamented the current state of the league and its emphasis on pace and three-point shooting that is quickly threatening to make old-school bruisers like himself irrelevant. But Howard isn’t going down without a fight:
“The way the (NBA) game is played (now), it’s all outside-in, it’s threes, it’s super-fast,” Howard told USA TODAY Sports. “It’s really like we’re dinosaurs, and they’re trying to extinct us. But the Ice Age will not come, and we will not be extinct.
Unfortunately for Howard, the End Times might already be upon us. The Rockets struggled to unload him prior to the February trade deadline, so he’ll find out firsthand this summer in free agency precisely how much the NBA world has cooled on players with his particular skill-set.
