At the turn of the decade in 2010, Dwight Howard was at the top of his game. He had been crushing it with Orlando, had won many Defensive Player of the Year awards, and was widely considered one of the best in the game. But for all of this, Howard had still not won a championship and didn’t look like he was very close to doing so either after losing in the Finals in 2009.
So by the time 2012 rolled around, Dwight was on the move, and he ended up joining the Los Angeles Lakers. The relationship was short-lived at the time; he was only there for a year. And things didn’t go too well between him and Kobe Bryant, though Dwight has revealed that the two got along better than most people know.
Howard would join the Houston Rockets in 2013 when the franchise was building a contending team around budding superstar James Harden. And while there were good early signs in terms of their relationship, it eventually started to deteriorate. Howard became a free agent in 2016 and declined his player option to stay. It seems by that point, there were issues between him and the Beard.
Dwight Howard Revealed He Left Los Angeles To Join James Harden But They Didn’t End Up Getting Along
Dwight Howard may have been one of the best players in NBA history, but he was not easy to get along with. And James Harden’s relationship started going south with him in Howard’s second year in Houston, something he spoke about on Shannon Sharpe’s podcast.
“I don’t think me and James is close. And I don’t know what happened. I’ve been trying to figure that out too, since I left Houston. Why is he acting like this? Cuz I left LA to go play with him… I would say in like our second season together, I feel like. ‘Hey we competing against each other when we should be competing… I should have had a conversation with him. That was my fault. I could have been better with talking to him. But I chose to go around him and we talked to other people.”
There are numerous examples in the NBA of relationships between stars collapsing thanks to them not being able to find common ground with one another. Howard and Harden could have won together, but Dwight was clearly not on the same page as him. It becomes yet another interesting ‘what if’ in NBA history.
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