Few pivots can match Dwight Howard’s peak

Dwight Howard deserves to have been voted for the Basketball Hall of Basketball Naismith Memorial in its first year of eligibility.

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Dwight Howard will be exalted to the Basketball Hall of Basketball Naismith Memorial this weekend, as part of a promotion of eight outstanding figures of basketball. Howard is a deserved candidate in his first vote: eight times All-Star, eight times All-NBA and three times defensive player of the year.

Although it is difficult to say that an exalted to the Hall of Fame in his first vote is undervalued, that label is applied to the newest springfield pivot, Massachusetts. In 2021, Howard was one of the 26 players in the history of the NBA with at least five appointments to the first All-NBA team. The other 25 were appointed to the 75th anniversary team of the League that year. Howard no.

The other players with three Or more appearances in the first All-NBA team that failed to be part of the 75th anniversary team were prior to the era of the 3 points, which means that Howard is the only player in the modern era with a level of praise close to his level that did not receive the honor.

But Howard’s game had defects. Like other dominant pivots such as Wilt Chamberlain and Shaquille O’Neal, it was a lousy free throw shooter (57% in their career). He committed twice the ball losses than of assists. It was an inefficient scorer in the post, despite often demanding the ball down: we do not have good monitoring data of Howard’s golden age, but since the 2013-14 season, it occupies the 62nd position of 65 players with 1,000 post-ups at points per play, according to Geniusiq.

But Howard’s historical underestimation seems rather a reflection of how his career developed.

Let’s compare Howard with Robert Parish, an example of longevity. The two pivots of the Hall of Fame have similar count statistics and a total of victories above the similar replacement, according to Basketball-Reference. However, they reached those final results by different paths: Howard reached its maximum potential and then fell quickly, while Parish adopted a slow and constant approach.

First 8 seasons

• Howard: 78.6 War

• Parish: 54.3 War

Rest of his career

• Howard: 27 War

• Parish: 55.4 War

The differences in their maximum value made Howard selected eight All-NBA teams throughout their career, while Parish only two (one second and a third). However, Parish continued to produce throughout its 30 years and won three titles with the Celtics of the 1980s (plus a room as the substitute for the Chicago Bulls in the 1996-97 season), so it was part of the 75th anniversary team, while Howard did not succeed.

Howard, on the contrary, accumulated very little value during the second half of his career. He was last-year-old at the age of 28, and after 30 years, he went from being the most requested pivot from the league to a NBA vagabund. Howard changed equipment in each of his last six seasons, working hard on a relative anonymity in the Southeast Division during the middle of that time before a successful return to Los Angeles, where Howard and Javale McGee formed a rotation of pivots that allowed Anthony Davis to play his preferred position of Ala-Povot. Howard or McGee were headlines in 18 of the 21 playoff games of Los Angeles Lakers on the way to the title of the 2019-20 season.

The long and anodine long arch of Howard’s career hides the extraordinarily high that came in its peak. (And I do not refer to the top that arrived literally, although he also did, with his “mate of the sticker” in the 2007 Matse contest).

Howard is one of the 19 players in the history of the NBA with five consecutive appointments to the first All-NBA team. The only other pivots on that list are Shaq and George Mikan. The only other players of the 21st century are LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Giannis Antetokounmpo, O’Neal, Luka Doncic and Kevin Durant, who, with the exception of the young maid, are recognized among the 25 best players in the NBA history.

Critics would argue that Howard so flatly dominated the vote for the All-NBA due to the lower competition caliber at that time. This idea has a certain merit: although the panorama of pivots was not as bleak during the reign of Howard as it would be half a decade later (the all-nba pivots in 2015-16 were Deandre Jordan, Demarcus Cousins ​​and Andre Drummond), the All-Nba pivots of the second and third team behind Howard were Amar’e Stoudemire (three times) (Twice), Shaq of the Suns era, Andrew Bogut, Al Horford, Andrew Bynum and Tyson Chandler. There are good players on that list, but few members of the Hall of Fame.

But Howard awards not only reflected positional shortage. His results in the vote for MVP in those five seasons were second, fourth, fifth and seventh; He was among the five best players throughout his golden age, regardless of position.

During the first half of his career, Howard was a key player in both directions. He was always available – in his first seven seasons, Howard played 82 games five times and never less than 78 – and is one of the four players with at least three trophies to the defensive player of the year (and the only one with three consecutive). Howard was much better than the other three – Rudy Gobert, Dikembe Mutombo and Ben Wallace – in attack; Howard ended his career with more points than Mutombo and Wallace Combined.

Howard’s strengths also helped Orlando Magic create a modern style before he became popular. With shooters like Rashard Lewis, Hed Turkoglu and Ryan Anderson occupying the attack zone with a dominant pivot, the Magic of the late 2000s advanced to his time. During Howard’s five years, which coincided with Stan Van Gundy’s five years as coach of Orlando Magic, the Magic led the league at a rate of triple attempts each season, according to Cleaning The Glass, while his defense allowed the lowest shooting rate to the hoop in four of those seasons. (Orlando finished second in that statistic in his fifth year).

Van Gundy and Howard’s companions at that time attributed Howard’s presence in painting to facilitate that approach. While his teammates shot from the deep, Howard led the NBA in Mates during six consecutive seasons, from 2005-06 to 2010-11.

This group of Magic players broke into the national scene at the Eastern Conference of 2009, when Howard contributed to one of the great surprises in the playoffs of the 21st century. Orlando strongly expired to the Cleveland Cavaliers, a team of 66 victories, who had had an 8-0 record in their first two series of playoffs, and avoided the expected duel of the finals between Kobe and LeBron. Howard scored 40 points in the decisive match of the conference finals for Orlando, and during that postseason, averaged 20 points, 15 rebounds and 2.6 caps.

The players who averaged at least 20 points and 15 rebounds while reaching the finals in the same post-season are a who who of the best centers in the history of the NBA: Bob Pettit (four times), Chamberlain (three), Shaq (two), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (two), Bill Russell (two), Howard, Duncan, Male Malone, Dave Cowens, Dave Cowens, Dave Cowens, Dave Cowens, Elgin Baylor and Mikan.

Howard also wins intangible points because it was the starting center of the Redeem Team that won the gold medal in 2008, and he (along with Nate Robinson) helped rejuvenate the Lye-Start-weekend overtime contest after a period of downturn for the event.

Unfortunately, Howard’s intangibles were not always so positive. And his career collapsed after 2012, when Howard asked to leave Orlando. He was transferred to the Lakers, which gave rise to the memorable cover of Sports Illustrated: “Now this will be fun.” And, perhaps the most important in the long term, he underwent back surgery.

In retrospect, Howard’s most representative team were not the Magic or the Lakers, but the Houston Rockets, with whom he played three years after his unsatisfactory first stage in the Lakers. Howard fulfilled the life cycle of a real rocket: it shone intensely and scoring and reached incredible heights before falling to the earth finally.