Lakers News: Dwight Howard Has Been Spilling The Tea For Years

The former Lakers reserve center remains unsigned this year.

Former 2021-22 Los Angeles Lakers backup center Dwight Howard, who at 36 still seems to have some NBA level ball left in a deep bench role should a team become interested, remains a free agent just under a week into the 2022-23 season. New Lakers center Damian Jones has been so terrible that Wenyen Gabriel has somewhat supplanted him as a small ball option for head coach Darvin Ham, while injury-prone Thomas Bryant, another new five for L.A., is already injured. Could Howard be in line for a fourth tour of duty in Los Angeles to wrap up his Hall of Fame career?

Probably not.

In the mean time, we thought we'd take a look back at one of the big ways Howard has ostracized folks around the league: by deflecting the blame for the petty team dramas in which he was very much a central figure. Howard has been trying to achieve some retroactive revisionism following a series of interpersonal conflicts in all three teams he played for during his Hall of Fame prime. 

During a 2017 interview with Marc J. Spears of Andscape, Howard claimed that, due to his very awkward final seasons as the Orlando Magic's All-NBA center in which he demanded coach firings and walked back a trade demand, he was miscast by the media as a malcontent. He can say what he wants now, but he was very much at the heart of the Orlando Magic drama.

"After [Orlando], people just decided that, 'He's not going to talk about it, so we might as well come up with a narrative and what we think went on in L.A. and what went on with Kobe [Bryant] and what we think happened with James [Harden with the Houston Rockets],'" Howard said. 

"I never had a personal vendetta with either one of those guys," the three-time Defensive Player of the Year told Spears. "People took it as me having a problem with them being on a team with another superstar… I've never been the one to say, 'OK, I want to talk about this because it was an issue with me.' But everyone else kind of made it a storyline."

To be fair, Bryant and Harden also have a long history of not getting along with All-Star teammates, be it Howard or Shaquille O'Neal for Bryant or Howard, Chris Paul, or Kyrie Irving for Harden (so far).