Life as a more traditional NBA big man isn’t easy these days.
The NBA is a pace-and-space league. Three-pointing shooting sells. Speed sells. Clock-killing post-ups don’t sell. Not as much as they once did.
Even bigs who specialize in devastating pick-and-roll finishes and rim protection can struggle to remain relevant. Towers are shooting jumpers and chucking threes now, too.
Hence Dwight Howard’s dilemma.
He is no longer considered elite, even though his numbers are solid. He is on the back end of his athletic prime, still struggles at the free-throw line and isn’t a threat to score beyond eight feet of the basket—and even that might be putting it generously.
Still, as he told USA Today’s Sam Amick, he refused to go down quietly:
“The way the (NBA) game is played (now), it’s all outside-in, it’s threes, it’s super-fast,” Howard told USA TODAY Sports. “It’s really like we’re dinosaurs, and they’re trying to extinct us. But the Ice Age will not come, and we will not be extinct.
“You watch a guy like Shaq (O’Neal) or Kareem (Abdul-Jabbar) and all these guys, and I don’t know if they would want to just play with guys shooting threes and stuff like that. They want to be fed, but it’s the evolution of the game. And the way you stay relevant is trying to find ways to play without focusing on not getting the ball … I think it’s all just a mindset. Some teams are better at it than others.”
Dwight Howard, 30, will become a free agent this summer, and his next deal, as well as the level of interest that punctuates his journey onto the open market, will be something of a referendum of how highly traditional bigs are viewed in today’s NBA.
Assuming health, Dwight Howard is better equipped than others to survive the rise of jump shooting teams. He is still crazy athletic, cut from the same mold as DeAndre Jordan, a rebounding, shot-blocking and pick-and-roll-finishing machine. Howard can function at a high level in that same role. He cannot anchor a top-tier defense on his own anymore, but if he can ditch the post-up usage he’s always been insistent on dabbling in and focus almost solely on catching lobs and finishing around the rim off the catch, he won’t be in danger of total extinction anytime soon.
