Why the Dwight Howard Backlash in Los Angeles Misses the Point

LOS ANGELES — As Kobe Bryant and Dwight Howard exchanged threatening looks and challenges in their first on-court meeting since Howard left Los Angeles, the Staples Center crowd finally had something to cheer about on Tuesday night, the audience already familiar with the roles assigned to the actors onstage.

About 20 feet away from the slaps Bryant delivered to Howard's forearms and the retaliatory elbow sent to Bryant's chin, actress Allison Janney watched from her front-row, A-list seat, and a scene from her celebrated television drama The West Wing came to mind.

In that episode, fiery White House operative Josh Lyman spars with a congressman over appropriations until the congressman hands him a letter for the President in which he announces his resignation from the Democratic Party.

"You're leaving the party because of me?" Lyman asks, incredulous.

"I'm not leaving because of you," he is told. "But you made it a whole lot easier."

The feelings left from Howard's 2012-13 season in Los Angeles—and controversial departure—were not clear before Bryant glared at Howard and Howard pointed angrily at Bryant. But Tuesday night they were obvious, right there in front of the assembled crowd and national TV audience. 

Dwight Howard did not leave the Lakers because of Kobe Bryant. But Bryant made it a whole lot easier.

Nothing came of their showdown, of course. Howard shouted, “I know you, dog,” insinuating Bryant would not go beyond posing and calling Howard “soft.”

“Try me,” Bryant memorably shot back.

It was grand theater in a long-awaited showdown that needed it. Bryant later laughed off the whole thing. Howard followed the advice of the Rockets’ staff and ignored questions about the incident. But a season after Howard laughed at the Staples Center taunts and sang along with the “Howard sucks” chants, he seemed tired of the whole thing.

“People are always going to talk,” Howard said. “I had a good time in L.A. It didn’t end like everybody wanted it to. But life happens; things happen. I moved forward from it. Hopefully, the fans and everybody else can.”

They won’t. Bryant and Howard barely glanced in each other’s direction before the first tip since they were teammates, not even exchanging the cold fist bump of Bryant’s first reunion with Shaquille O’Neal. After the game, Bryant attempted to be above it all, as Howard had in his own less artful way, but neither seemed over their parting.

In the end, assuming the end of things ever comes, that might be Bryant's biggest problem with Howard. For all of their differences in styles, Bryant had deigned to recruit Howard to stay. He could not help but do it with a condescending appeal, offering to teach Howard how to win. But he did make his version of a pitch along with the Lakers' offer of $118 million.

Bryant lost, and he does not take losing well.

The rest is noise. The notion that Howard does not take his profession sufficiently serious, as Lakers coach Byron Scott suggested to Baxter Holmes of ESPN.com on Monday, was always nonsense.

Howard does clown. He smiles on the court. He smiled when he and Bryant were trading invectives on Tuesday.

But his work ethic, from the practice court to the weight rooms, is not up for debate. If anyone should know the difficulty of coming back from a serious injury and surgery, as Howard had in his one Lakers season, it is now Bryant. And if any franchise should know that different styles should be welcome, that would be the Lakers, who put the stoic Kareem Abdul-Jabbar together with the joyful Magic Johnson and created Showtime.

Howard does not have the accomplishments of the Lakers legends he was invited to join, but he has not fallen short because he is silly in the locker room an hour after the game or smiles on the court during the game.

That narrative took hold after Howard's sloppy departure from Orlando and unsatisfying season in Los Angeles, as if the hits to his reputation were the penalty for so badly botching his efforts to join a winner.

The backlash in Los Angeles, however, is about more than that.

Before every meeting with the Lakers and even every game in Los Angeles against the Clippers, Howard has been asked to explain again why he would leave the Lakers, as if such a thing is unthinkable even after the injuries that were predictable given Bryant's and Steve Nash's age and miles caught up to them.

Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press

The worst Lakers season ever in Los Angeles probably should have ended questions about why Howard would rather sign on to team with James Harden in his prime rather than Bryant in his twilight, but on the morning of the season opener, Howard explained again.

“I didn’t leave L.A. because I was afraid of Kobe Bryant,” Howard said of the ESPN report that Bryant has scared off free agents. “I went to a good situation for myself. I can’t change people’s opinions, but I did what I had to do for myself.”

But if the Lakers and their legion of loyalists could ever accept that Howard made his decision based on where he was going, rather than the team he was leaving, they would have to acknowledge what has happened to the NBA's signature franchise.

Since that Sports Illustrated cover with Howard, Nash and Bryant and the declaration that "This is going to be fun," Bryant lost a season to injury, Howard left, and Nash's career likely came to an end. The Lakers owe the Suns two first-round picks. If the pain were not deep enough, last June's greatly promising first-round pick, Julius Randle, broke his leg in the opener. And since Howard bolted from the Lakers as a free agent, Pau Gasol did, too.

The Lakers and their fans can either acknowledge the wreckage that Howard left behind or blame Howard for leaving them.

Of course Howard did not leave the Lakers because of Bryant, but it's easier to pretend he did than to face all of the other reasons.

The Rockets are about where they were when Howard joined them, solidly in the pack of Western Conference playoff teams but a step or two removed from the upper echelon of contenders. But as the Rockets brushed aside the Lakers so easily on opening night, the Lakers' best option seemed to be to lose often enough to secure one of the top five picks in the next draft to postpone sending it to Phoenix.

Do that and opening night’s mix of comedy (the Bryant-Howard exchange) and tragedy (Randle’s injury) would be replaced by the hope that Bryant does not treat the entire season and everyone around him the way he threatened to treat Howard.

All of that returns us, in L.A. style, to another once-great production now gone. If The West Wing in its glory days was drama, the question about why Howard would leave comes off as satire.

The question is not why he would leave, but why would anyone still ask.