The Los Angeles Lakers made some poor roster decisions after they won the NBA championship in 2020, and letting go of a valuable backup big man like Dwight Howard was one of them.
Anthony Davis has thrived next to a legitimate center in his career, but the Los Angeles Lakers chose not to retain Dwight Howard in 2020. And recently, Howard opened up on what went down between him and the team that summer.
“I was hyped too, I was hella hyped,” Howard said talking about his potential return to the team in 2020. “My agent, he texted me, and he was telling me about the Lakers… I said, ‘Can they give me two years, I just want to be somewhere stable to end my career.’ We’d just won a championship and I feel like I deserved… It ain’t gotta be a lot, just way to end my career with the Lakers and riding off into the sunset.
“And so he was like, ‘They’ll give you a year.’ And I was like, ‘For real?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah.’ I was like, ‘Give me 15 minutes, let me think about it for whatever.’ So I hung up the phone and then I called him back, ‘Yo, tell them I’ll do it. And if I do good, hopefully they’ll give me another contract.’ And he called back and he said, ‘The Lakers don’t have an offer for you.’
“And I had tweeted saying I was going back to the Lakers because I had to make that decision… And he called me back and said, ‘Yo, you gotta delete that tweet, bro.'”
Dwight Howard on @LateNightLakers details how he intended to re-sign with the Lakers after the title; but they rescinded the offer after “I asked for 15 mins to think about it” pic.twitter.com/rV8dyRFNqP
— 🏆LakersGuru🏆 (@GuruLakers) May 25, 2023
Dwight Howard played 15.7 minutes per game for the Lakers in the 2019-20 playoffs and provided excellent rim protection as well as 5.8 points on average. He could have expected to return to the team, but he didn’t and they haven’t quite found a replacement for what he offered even three years after the fact. This is despite Howard himself returning to the team for a brief stint in the 2021-22 season.
Dwight Howard Wasn’t Able To Influence Winning Very Much After He Left
After the Lakers’ offer fell through, Dwight Howard signed with the Philadelphia 76ers. He played in 69 games but his averages fell from the previous season. He then played 60 games for the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2021-22 season but averaged just 6.2 points and eventually found himself in Taiwan after no one else picked him up.
Dwight Howard now spends a lot of his time trying to get other NBA stars to come to Taiwan, although he’s not been very successful with that. The ‘what if’ will always remain in terms of what the Lakers could have done had they kept their title-winning team together.
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