Dwight Howard Is The Sixers' Sorest Thumb
Dwight Howard Is The Sixers' Sorest Thumb
He’s been much better and worse than I expected.
Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and is now writing for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.
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Boy, I was not excited for the Dwight Howard experience in the slightest. We'd been promised (by no one in particular) a returning Nerlens Noel as our backup five for the 2020-21 season, and instead we got this obnoxious manchild who'd worn out his welcome in Orlando, Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta and Charlotte -- Charlotte!! -- before seemingly washing out of the league entirely with Washington two seasons ago. A championship run back with the Lakers, now as their good-soldier emergency big, seemed to serve as a redemption tour for Dwight -- but not only did they have no interest in bringing him back, league-wide interest was so low that he signed a minimum deal with the Sixers just hours after erroneously announcing his return to L.A. I felt certain he would immediately slot in as my least-favorite Sixer since at least Mike Muscala.
That hasn't happened. Which isn't to say I totally like having Dwight on the Sixers, necessarily -- he's been a pleasant surprise in many areas, and an even bigger disaster than expected in others. Mostly, I just think it's hilarious that he's on the team at all, the sorest thumb to ever stick out on the Sixers' bench.
A large part of it is the relatively new experience for me of getting to watch a controversial-but-Hall-of-Fame-caliber player for close to his entire career. I started watching basketball seriously again in the mid-'00s, around when Dwight was beginning to rise to prominence -- so I got to see his rise to stardom, his honeymoon phase with the public as a Slam Dunk Contest champion and commercial fixture, his sooner-than-expected run to the '09 Finals, his growth into an all-around beast, a perennial MVP candidate and a three-time Defensive Player of the Year winner. And then I got to watch him worm his way out of Orlando, wither under the L.A. spotlight, underwhelm in Houston and Atlanta, and devolve from a beloved face of the league to an overpaid walking punchline. I got to see the game grow past him, for the skill set that once allowed him to dominate on both ends to now relegate him to role-player status, even as he still fancied himself a franchise-altering force. And then I got to see the coda to the 15-year rise and fall saga, to see him shed his superstar trappings, embrace his specified role and still play a major part in the Lakers' first finals campaign in a decade. It wasn't my favorite NBA drama of the past decade and a half, but it was one of the first ones I felt like I got to watch basically the whole way through.
Except it wasn't actually over yet. In a move that no one saw coming -- possibly not even Daryl Morey, until he was actually calling it in -- Dwight signed with the Sixers on the first day of free agency, in order to be our backup center. And not "backup center" in that "backup unless you can prove to be more reliable than JaVale McGee" sense: backup in the "you're playing behind an MVP candidate and you're not getting more than 15 minutes any night when he's in the building and also we can cut you at any time" sense. I figured he was guaranteed to be more trouble than he was worth; LeBron could keep him in line because he was LeBron, but on the Sixers, he'd either alienate our best players with his aloof shenanigans or just encourage them to take their own responsibilities less seriously. I was about as interested in any "veteran leadership" or "championship experience" Howard could offer Embiid and Simmons as I would be in Fergie executive producing the next Dua Lipa album.
But to his credit, that's not really what he's trying to do on this Sixers team. Rather, he seems to have taken on the self-appointed duties of Bench Unit Big Brother -- he's there for the kids, hyping them up, leading their wild sideline celebrations of dunks and three-pointers, dispensing wisdom as needed but mostly just buying the beer and making sure everyone drinks responsibly under his supervision. There was that "30 seconds of pure VIBES" video going around Twitter earlier in the week of the team pumping themselves up to play in an empty not-Wells Fargo Center -- actually looking excited to be playing with one another, for the first time in franchise history since roughly the early '80s -- and sure enough, there was Dwight at the center of it, skipping around his teammates, doing the Warriors "CAN YOU DIG IT???" callout thing to the non-existent crowd. By season's end, he's going to be wearing a sideways hat and a giant clock and punctuating every sentence with a jagged "boyyyyeeeeeeeee."
Point is, this is a surprisingly good role for him. As Spike mentioned on the weekend Ricky, it's a lot easier to stomach Dwight's all-caps personality as a sideshow rather than the main event -- now that he's playing 14 minutes a game and not really serving as the team's front-and-center spokesperson in any meaningful capacity, sure, let the goofball run wild. Being a basketball pariah for the better part of a decade seems to have humbled him into being Good Vibes Only, and as long as his general hooting and hollering aren't coming with accompanying demands for more post touches or playing time, they seem pretty harmless. It's a long season even in a shortened season; it's nice to know that at least one guy will be bringing energy to the locker room every night.
As for his actual on-court contributions, well... at the very least, even at age 36 he's probably the most athletic backup big we've ever had. After what feels like a decade of watching Amir Johnson, Al Horford and Kyle O'Quinn lumbering around the paint like a bunch of surly nightwatchmen, it's positively surreal to see a big off the bench who can and will throw down any pass thrown within a 10-foot oop radius, who gets offensive boards and occasionally even puts them back, who can offer more than words of gentle-but-firm discouragement when it comes to rim protection. The really wild thing about Howard being brought in ostensibly in part as a veteran mentor to Embiid is that it's actually Dwight who still has the game of the raw, physical freak 20-something, and Jo who has the refined craft and high-level court discipline, even as he sometimes isn't quite as explosive or hustling as you picture him once being.
That's all fine, and so are the basic numbers: 15.5 points and 16.7 rebounds per 36 minutes while shooting 71% from the floor should basically make the artist formerly known as D-12 a godsend as our backup center. The problem, of course, in those per 36 numbers is the 5.0 turnovers, the 8.8 fouls, and the 10.2 instances of me yelling "Aw, COME ON, Dwight!!" at my TV. The tradeoff for losing the earthbound drudgery of our former backup bigs with Dwight Howard is that we also lose any sense of touch or finesse they possessed; everything with Dwight is a club bludgeoning. He's an agent of total chaos who makes me nervous whenever he gets close to the ball, on either end of the court. Tangling cartoonishly with Jarrett Allen pre-inbounds against the Nets last night, he was lucky to have the refs just separate them and essentially let him off with a warning; he nonetheless resumed scrapping immediately afterwards and was quickly whistled for the foul. The total lack of grace is just breathtaking.
For two seven-minute backup stretches a night, you can just kinda take the good with the bad and hold your breath until Embiid checks back in to restore order. In a way it does relieve pressure and make things easier for our young guns like Shake Milton and Tyrese Maxey to have this whirling dervish in the middle of the court, tossing bodies out of their way and trying to dunk anything they throw around the basket that isn't already going in. But anything more is just wildly unsustainable -- the one game Jo sat this year and Dwight started, you saw just how incompatible his Tasmanian Devil style is with a functional starting unit. Lineup juggling is an inexact science, but when it comes to playing Dwight, it's like baking a cake: follow the recipe to the goddamn letter or risk having the thing explode in a mess of drawn charges, technical fouls and flagrant ones. (To be fair, that's on both sides; last night Dwight was so annoying against the Nets that he practically baited our old friend Timothé Luwawu-Cabarrot into picking up a tech by whipping the ball at him.)
But it's that refusal to just fade into the background of his new squad that makes the Dwight Howard experience such a trip. His personality and play are both so big and attention-hawking that you never forget for a second that's Dwight Howard over there, wearing a Sixers jersey -- the future Hall of Famer turned super-unlikely fan favorite who'll probably win us a game in the playoffs this year and then lose us two more. It's not what any of us expected or even wanted from our backup center position this season, but again, long season, and sometimes you just need a franchise subplot to keep things interesting in a relatively low-stakes way. It won't define this team's season the way Joel mounting his first true MVP campaign will, or the debate over (and maybe the fruition of) a potential Simmons-Harden swap, or sadly, maybe now Seth Curry's positive COVID diagnosis. But guarantee that 15 years from now, when most of these late-Process seasons start to mush together in our memory, you'll be able to say "the Dwight season" and everyone will know exactly what you're talking about. For better and worse, Dwight doesn't blend.