Why Dwight Howard Far from Guarantees Lakers a Championship

Howard’s tenure with the Lakers is less than one week deep, but championship optimism is already running rampant throughout Tinseltown. But despite the addition of Howard—the league’s best center—Los Angeles’ future is far from written in stone or guaranteed to culminate in additional hardware.

Does Howard make the Lakers better? In many aspects of the game, yes. The condition of his back aside, Howard is a lot more consistent on both ends of the floor than Andrew Bynum has ever proven to be. He doesn’t have as much range on the offensive end, but defensively his anticipation, mobility and execution are all superior.

That said, the Lakers are still faced with some of the same problems they were before dealing for Howard, among new ones. Now, it’s not just about this team establishing chemistry, it’s about proving they’re even compatible enough to build chemistry in the first place.

Kobe Bryant has played alongside dominant big men his entire career, so the presences of Pau Gasol and Howard hardly change his game plan, but he’s not familiar with the stylings of a ball-dominating genius in Steve Nash. The point guard’s existence essentially means that Bryant must learn to play off the ball more. Like Carmelo Anthony, he prefers to create offense for himself, but with the addition of a top-tier floor general, his isolation sets certainly won’t be as plenty.

And then you have the Nash and Howard combination. Nash will work wonders for Gasol, who loves to roll over screens and work off pick-and-rolls, but Howard is not known for such prowess. He’s more comfortable attempting to overpower his opponents in the paint, or simply hoping his shooters stretch the floor enough to get him an easy two-points down low.

With Nash at the helm, though, Howard is going to have to embrace the concept of the pick-and-roll and perhaps even add a baby jumper to his arsenal to ensure its effectiveness. Nash is an offensive-wielding genius, and Howard now has the opportunity to take his game to the next level on that end, but it’s far from a lock that he does.

And then we have perhaps the most important question for this docket of stars: Will Gasol and Howard be able to co-exist in the low post?

It may seem like an ignorant question at first, but in fact, to not acknowledge this query is naive.

Howard has hardly ever been forced to share the paint over the course of his career. He’s been surrounded by guards and stretch forwards, who leave him to operate down low freely. While Gasol has some serious range, he’s not about to hover around the three-point line the entire game like Ryan Anderson did.

So is there enough room in the paint for these two to operate together, or will the Lakers’ interior attack prove counter-productive at times the way the Magic’s was when Howard and Glen “Big Baby” Davis were on the floor together in Orlando last season?

That’s a question we can hardly provide any true clarity to. Yet even if we could—with certainty—declare such a pairing a future success, it’s going to take time. Just as the Heat struggled to find their identity upon their formation, the Lakers will struggle to find theirs. And Los Angeles’ is arguably more complicated because it has the likes of four superstars, three of which can no longer be considered to be in their prime.

So, can the Lakers get their prolific act together in time to deliver Bryant his sixth ring, and Howard and Nash their first?

They most certainly have the talent necessary to do so, but such attainment is far from an inevitable reality.