dhsilv2 wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:dhsilv2 wrote:
At his peak, he was a better basketball player.
And I wouldn't call it ignorance, it's more about what they focus on. A lot of guys have their issues over their careers, most people in the present focus far too much on the negatives. Over time people look back at more of the positives.
It will be ignorance if and when people argue about Howard's time in Orlando as if he wasn't the one who destroyed it, simple as that, and it will be ignorance if people try to justify that without understanding that Howard's problematic mindset is the reason why he struggled so much as he played toxic journeyman from there on out.
I agree with you though in the sense that we do get trapped in the moment and can overstate the importance of certain things that lead to emotional assessment, and I'll go further that in something like basketball analysis, we get to see new data and information after the fact that can leave us wiser than contemporaries were. As an example of that:
'10-11 was a strange season where really no one had an MVP level year, but I still had a list, and Howard was my choice. I noted at the time though how awkward it was because the team had gotten WORSE specifically because of trades that had been made to placate Howard, and in the process this had actually made Howard more valuable from an on/off perspective because they traded Gortat for players who could actually play with Howard. Even at the time, this made me uncomfortable, but I wasn't willing to judge Howard too harshly for it at the time.
But time marched on, we saw how the situation played out, and so we can now definitely state that the moves made before '10-11 were part of a slow moving car crash wherein Howard step-by-step destroyed what was basically his perfect situation, which would then be followed by him destroying other situations that were also quite promising.
So then, if you were looking to draft Howard, knowing what you know now, how would you see him? Would you see him as a guy a franchise could expect to cleanly build around? I'd say that would be foolish. At this point we know he was extremely immature and that even building the team to a point it could make deep runs into the playoff wouldn't be enough to necessarily keep him happy. Even worse, because he was so indecisive and had so little understanding of how team building worked you couldn't even rely on him to tell you when we wanted out. And all this before we circle back to remember that this was a guy with zero work ethic who clearly was built to peak at a young age since he didn't have it in him to actually master old man game.
The work ethic stuff is going too far for me. He had some major back injuries and imo shouldn't have played in 2013 at all. I think the lakers decision/howards decision to let him play that year was wrong and ruined him. Back injuries are serious stuff. I'm not sure one ever recoveries fully from that kind of thing. Perhaps I'm giving him too much credit for that, but when big players have back issues they never seem to go away.
I'll put it this way:
It's actually pretty common for young guys to have terrible work ethics. Guys like Howard and Derrick Rose were said to basically live off of candy. They had no real discipline. They played instinctively, and because they were so explosive they got away with it.
Now, could they have developed better work ethics over time? Well yes, they did, but they remained problematic.
In Howard's case the most salient thing was him insisting on getting many opportunities to score using a back-to-the-basket post game. He had chosen to focus his practice on that seemingly in response to Shaq chiding him for his inability to score that way. But that had never been Howard's strength, and it's never been less valuable than it is now. So even when Howard chose to work on something, he wasn't really listening to proper mentors, and of course this has everything to do with why team after team has given up on him.
Perhaps a better term for Howard is that he's just not very teachable. He's like the opposite of Kawhi. And teachability is a real thing, that I think you should be factoring in when evaluating players.
Last note:
I come at all this in a way I tend to call franchise-oriented. That's a philosophical perspective, and philosophy is a matter of personal opinion. It is fine if you don't come at it the same way. But however you approach things, you need to try to understand how much of a player's success came as a result of context, because otherwise you risk over or underrating his actual contribution.
Back when Howard leading the Magic to title contention, it was commonly argued that he was doing it "by himself". That he was the only serious talent on the team, and that he by himself was essentially creating an elite defense. This wasn't accurate.
On offense, the team thrived because of ahead-of-its-time use of spacing wherein considerably more shooting was happening from the perimeter than the interior. While Howard was the lead scorer, the offense was not built with him as an alpha option in the volume scoring sense. He wasn't asked to work in the post Hakeem-style, which was good because he couldn't do it. He got a lot of his points off of assists and he got a lot of his points off of offensive rebounds. For these reasons it's definitely wrong to look at him as if he was a top tier offensive anchors - and it's also why it made sense to think he'd be less valuable over time unless he grew in other areas immensely.
Defense though is the bigger issue. I actually don't even have a problem with his DPOYs, but one defensive player can only do so much. While his teammates were not defensive stars, they played good team defense masterminded by a very smart coach (who of course Howard treated terribly because that's what Howard does).
Howard deserves a lot of credit for the good that happened in Orlando of course, but when we're talking about him vs a guy like Ewing, it's important to think about what SVG could have done with Ewing in that situation. The fact that Ewing never had an argument for seriously being the MVP while Howard did is not enough to be able to argue that Howard had the better peak.
