Dwight Howard: Greatness, or a smile on the court for D12?

Dwight Howard

The Free Agency started on July 1 in the NBA and with that a lot of buzz has been around a lot of players. But no buzz could be bigger than that surrounding Dwight Howard as a Free Agent. This Free Agency could very well define the future of both Dwight and the team that he signs with. With all the speculation, the money that he can get with the Lakers ($118 million) and the very chance to play in the great Lakers franchise, one would think that he’d want to re-sign with the Lakers. But that’s not what it looks like.

First of all, everyone is talking about Dwight not signing with LA because the Lakers didn’t have any chemistry last year. But if you look into the past, towards the making of any eventual Championship team, you’d see that they didn’t have chemistry right away; it took them time to develop it. When the Lakers signed NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal back in 1996, he and eventually one of the NBA’s top leading scorers, Kobe Bryant, didn’t win a championship right away. So chemistry is not an issue; that comes with time.

For re-signing Dwight to a 5-year, $118 million contract, the Lakers not only have the advantage of offering Dwight $33 million more than any other team in the NBA, but they also have a knack for shopping great NBA big men. As Kobe tweeted on July 1 when the free agency officially started, “Start of free agency is always interesting.. Many teams. Only one Lakers #goldenarmor #FreeAgency #LA #bleedgold“.

But there is one thing that will tell you why Dwight Howard is not likely to sign with the LA Lakers, which no other sports channel/website will tell you, and that is the fact that there was too much blabbering between “D12″ and almost everybody else on the Lakers team in the last season. On court, he blabbered with Steve Nash, he blabbered almost after every defensive play broke down and looked disappointed in his teammates; rightly so on the defensive aspect, because the team frequently let him down on that end of the court.

He almost always threw some words back at Mike D’Antoni whenever he called Dwight to the bench. Even if Mike would have told him something about his play in the game, which is the job of a coach, Howard would have some words to throw at his coach while he would be walking to the bench.