Dwight Howard’s NBA journey has taken a long and circuitous route to get to where we are today, with a few left turns, unexpected pit stops and detours along the way. Still, Howard eventually arrived at his ultimate destination this fall when he brought home his first NBA championship with the Lakers.
The fact that it was with the Lakers is itself a small miracle, given his checkered history with the franchise after his ill-fated stint in 2012. It was surprising that the Lakers — let alone any other team — would take a chance on Howard at all with the way his career had been going, bouncing around to different teams and flaming out due to some combination of injuries and an unwillingness to accept his role.
What it took, ultimately, was a change of perspective for Howard, and that meant dialing down some of his baser tendencies and channeling his focus on the task at hand. Throughout his career, Howard has often been criticized for not taking things more seriously, but with his newfound personal growth, he believes he can help his new teammate Joel Embiid with managing his own similar proclivities.
Via Tim Bontemps of ESPN:
“I think the things Joel does is great. It makes other opponents upset, it keeps him locked in and the team plays better. Now will there be times when we all have to be a little bit more serious? Yes. And that’s something we’ll all have to learn together. How to be in certain situations. But I don’t think that’s a part of sacrifice. I think that’s a part of just understanding time and place.
“And I think that will be good for me to help show some of the younger guys because I have been in that position before where people thought I wasn’t focused or that I was playing too much. Maybe for the people on the outside it did look like I was playing around too much. So it’s just finding ways to do things right for the team, and I think we’ll do that this year.”
Emiid earned a reputation as a jokester earlier in his career for his highly-entertaining social media presence, his penchant for relentlessly trash-talking rival big men around the league, and his unfiltered approach when speaking to the media. But Embiid has cultivated a much lower profile in that regard over the past couple of seasons. Whether Howard can somehow help him achieve some kind of balance remains to be seen.
(ESPN)