What is All the Fuss About Dwight Howard Anyway?
The sports world has been flooded with the constant news reports of Dwight Howard. Howard wants to be traded! Dwight Howard won’t sign with this team if traded! Howard to the Rockets perhaps! Howard doesn’t want sugar on his cornflakes!
No player is above being annoying if you are talked about ALL the time. This goes for all sports. It doesn’t matter if you’re the sports equivalent of the President, an Air Force general, or Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie; if you are ubiquitous in the news for a good period of time, you are going to go from interesting to boring to annoying.
To a normal, casual, uninformed sports fan this has to beg the question of what’s so great about this guy anyway. Who in the world is Dwight Howard?
Subject’s name is Dwight David Howard. Born December 8, 1985 in Atlanta, Georgia. Age 26 and will be 27 in the next NBA year. Attended the Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy for high school until 2004.
Skipped college and entered the 2004 NBA Draft. Drafted with the top overall pick by the Orlando Magic. Is 6’11 and plays the position of center in a basketball game.
Accomplishments in the NBA include: Six All-Star selections, Member of the 2005 NBA All-Rookie First Team, Five All-NBA First Team selections, Four All-NBA Defensive First Team selections and Three Defensive Player of the Year awards and helped the Magic to an NBA finals in the 2009 season.
Per game averages include: 18.4 points, 2.2 blocks, 13 total rebounds, 36.2 minutes, and one steal. His main drawback in this report’s opinion is he lacks discipline at the free-throw line. He’s a lifetime 58.8% shooter at free shots, so teams are not afraid to foul him.
That concludes this report and me sounding like a government agent revealing top secret material.*
*If Dwight Howard has anymore flaws or other special traits in his game that you, the reader, have noticed, please inform me of them. I don’t always get the Magic games in West Texas where I live.
Dwight Howard is the closest thing to an ideal center that he NBA has. He plays great defense. He’s big enough to score a lot of points in the paint. He scores with powerful dunks that pump up the crowd and team. The only thing he can’t do, which most centers can’t do, is score a lot of free
throws.
Dwight Howard is the best center in the NBA due to a few reasons. The first is he’s amazingly good. The second is he’s been in a system in Orlando that has allowed him to flourish. And the third is because there is a severe lack of centers in the NBA.
Centers are either rare in the NBA or not very good. A lot of team use power-forwards who play center like Tim Duncan with the San Antonio Spurs and Chris Bosh with the Miami Heat. Yao Ming was one of the truly special, but his body couldn’t handle the game and he retired at age 30.
These facts put make NBA teams treat Howard like a crown jewel. That’s why the sports world is focused on him. They know he’s unhappy in Orlando. He’s stated he wants out. He’s a free agent after this year. Orlando even fired Stan Van Gundy as their head coach to appease Howard.
It didn’t work and Howard still wants out.
Teams will want Dwight Howard, but since he’s on a one-year deal, it will take a team that either is comfortable with taking a chance on a guy who go to free agency after the year is over or a team that can get Howard to extend his contract with them a few more years.
That’s why going after Dwight Howard is such a complicated matter. Howard isn’t going to be content with a lackluster team trading for him. If the Charlotte Bobcats traded for Howard, there is a snowball’s chance in a volcano that Charlotte would re-sign him to a long-term deal.
That team didn’t win 10 games last year for crimedy’s sake. Howard would play one year and then leave that team in free agency, so only a group of fools would trade a lot for a guy who they know they can’t keep. That limits the number of trading partners.
A lot of things factor into Dwight Howard and whatever team will get him after Orlando.
Money, players, and/or draft picks will decide what team gets Howard from the Magic. Money, ability to compete and comfort factor will play the largest roles when it comes to re-signing Howard after he’s traded.
This thing may take months to finish. I bet there will be a lot of rumors about Howard being traded here or there and some will have no substance to them. So far, we are in the middle of the movie.
The entire NBA fanbase will have to deal with Dwight Howard’s situation for quite some time.
