LOS ANGELES — Reporters could hear LeBron James coming before he came into view. On Friday night ahead of the Los Angeles Lakers’ 125-103 blasting of the Washington Wizards, James and his personal speaker system blared through the locker room. The noisy scene, in which media and team staffers continued making small talk through the hip-hop concert that had broken out, played out until James was good and ready to turn off the song.
Minutes later, Dwight Howard made his entrance. Noiselessly and nearly inconspicuously, Howard, with AirPods in his ears, made a beeline toward a players’ only area. Though he placed a hand on the shoulder of a person he knew as a way to say hello, Howard never stopped moving.
The contrast in the two arrivals left little doubt who runs the Lakers’ workplace. And judging by Howard’s acceptance of a subordinate role this season during his return to L.A., he’s perfectly fine with that.
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Howard, 33, signed a non-guaranteed deal late in the summer to join the Lakers as a backup big man. In this role off the bench, Howard has excelled as a purely defensive asset on Los Angeles’s roster. Entering Friday’s game, Howard was pulling down 12.8 rebounds per 36 minutes while operating with a 103.0 defensive rating. Against his former team, Howard played 19 minutes and pulled down five rebounds.
Howard scored just eight points, but the Lakers didn’t need his offense. Superstar teammates James and Anthony Davis combined for 49 points and both sat out the fourth quarter.
While Howard, a former eight-time all-star, plays a fringe role, his former coach has taken notice.
Howard’s performance this season is “exactly the reason we wanted him,” Wizards Coach Scott Brooks said, reflecting on the Wizards’ decision to sign Howard ahead of the 2018-19 campaign. “To really shore up some of our weaknesses, the paint and rebounding and contesting shots and keeping guys from scoring around the basket. Unfortunately, he was hurt from Day 1, but he used all last year to get his body right and came back into camp in great shape.”
Although Howard spent last year on the Wizards’ roster, he appeared in just nine games before undergoing season-ending spinal surgery. Howard spent the rest of the year recovering in his home in Atlanta. Before the shut down, however, Howard entered the season with high expectations.
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Howard had experienced being traded and waived, and what was once a surefire Hall of Fame career was spiraling into a cautionary tale. So Howard chiseled his body fat down to 3.3 percent and expanded his practice shots to beyond the three-point arc in advance of the season.
During his introductory news conference, Howard peppered his speech with the right things — “it’s about winning,” he said often — he still envisioned a Superman role for himself.
“I’m looking forward to doing that here in D.C. I got the cape. I wiped it off. It was a little dusty, had a couple holes in it. So I had my seamstress put it back together, and I got it cleaned,” Howard said in July 2018. “So, yeah, I’m looking forward to putting the cape back on and enjoying my time in D.C.”
However, after the Wizards shipped Howard away to Memphis this past summer and he spent weeks without a team, he showed up in Los Angeles humbled and hungry.
“He came to us in a good place from a standpoint of wanting to change his game and accept any role that we present to him,” Lakers Coach Frank Vogel said. “We presented a role that’s different than what he’s had in those places offensively and not so much defensively other than improving the discipline. What I felt what we could do with him has played out on the basketball court so far.”
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Inside the locker room, where the superstars James and Anthony Davis take up one wall of the stalls, Howard has a space squeezed between Jared Dudley and Troy Daniels. While he may wear hoodies with his likeness on them, Howard has a much more subdued presence. And it’s working for him.
“Honestly, didn’t really have a clear perception because I never met him before,” Lakers forward Kyle Kuzma said of Howard. “I always try to say you never really try to judge a book by its cover, so I don’t really judge people.
“But he’s been great. He’s been a great teammate. He’s been a guy that’s always cheering people on,” Kuzma said. “He seems like he’s a changed man. He don’t really have no ego. Don’t really care about scoring … he just wants to win, play defense, set screens, do the little things. So he’s been a great teammate.”
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