National Basketball Association

Can Howard learn from LeBron's turnaround?

Published Apr. 8, 2012 1:00 a.m. ET

foxsports

This is what Dwight Howard should expect because this is what Dwight Howard deserves:

Ridicule.

Anger.

Doubt.

Angst.

And he deserves an organization, no matter which one he eventually chooses to play for, that once its members come to know him, will doubt him at the most basic of levels – as a teammate, as a winner, as a man with the ability to fulfill his incredible potential.

This is what you deserve when you play games with your coach and his career and then that coach publicly calls you on your crap. This is what you deserve when you play a man’s game with your immense power and talent — a big-time star’s big-time power play — with the maturity of a 13-year-old and the sensitivity of the emotionally tone deaf.

This is what you deserve when you hold teams captive to your ego, when you say stupid things such as your most recent decision to stick around was in part based on the Magic supplying you your “favorite candies,” when you flash to the world all the insolence and damage unique to a clueless man of power and means — and when, to date, you’re more a stat machine than a closer in a league in which winning championships should be the only way to earn the right to dictate your terms.

Last Thursday, when Orlando head coach Stan Van Gundy told an astonished scrum of sports writers that he knew for a fact from the highest level of his organization that Howard had indeed asked that he be fired, the head coach did more than unburden himself from living the lie.

He unburdened us, too. There’s no more reason to pretend. Dwight Howard is the new LeBron James just as surely as LeBron James has taken steps away from his status as a world-wide sports villain this season.

A quick recap: LeBron’s self-imposed move into villain-hood — “I’m taking my talents to South Beach” — had almost nothing to do with the world’s jealousy, elitism and or hatred against a great player. It was simple: In an America with gulfs of inequity — in a country with so many doing so well and yet so many more struggling so mightily — it is hard for the zeitgeist to take such galling arrogance, cluelessness and self-absorption from someone so successful and blessed without turning it into poison. It’s as simple as that, and the fact that in a culture where winning cures all things, LeBron kept on not winning.

So LeBron walked into a public-relations prison of his own making, paid his dues and seems to have gotten out. There’s still no telling if he’ll win it all (though it’s looking good), but he’s mostly won off the court this season.

He did a truly courageous act that has nothing to do with building his brand by donning a hoodie for Trayvon Martin. He’s dialed down his tendency to flash his shortcomings, whether it was Karmagate, Bumpgate, the cartoon show “The LeBrons” or a host of other signs from last season he just didn’t get it. Even the olive branches he’s extended at times this year, including saying he could see himself playing in Cleveland, have shown a LeBron somewhere between a guy who at least understands what he did and a guy who’s actually grown.

Either way, he’s no longer telegraphing to everyone in the world that the guy from The Decision hasn’t changed a lick.

Howard might want to pay attention to all of this, because what LeBron’s been through — and how it parallels Howard’s world — could be a big part of what is transferred from the Chosen One to Superman beyond the simple mantle of the NBA’s new, highly-petulant villain.

In being exposed for who he was, LeBron’s tendency to, at times, play poorly under pressure during his Cleveland years intensified, ending in a Finals collapse that the less forgiving among us might attribute to karma.

And Dwight has certainly shown the same tendency for closing late, even if those focused only on stats point out, correctly, that he’s a really good basketball player.

LeBron, too, in the lead up to that public failure was mostly miserable his first year in Miami. He could not handle the criticism, or the angst, and neither he nor his team seemed able to carry that particularly heavy load of intense criticism or meet those even more intense expectations. His off-court problems — the ones that came with being a self-righteous, unlikable blowhard — impacted his play and that of his teams.

It was a year of figuring out, the hard way, that he was not the chosen one he thought — he was not unconditionally beloved by strangers; he was not as infallible as his entourage would have him believe; and he was not as destined for greatness as he’d been told by the world since he was a teenager.

Reality crashed in, and it made life on the basketball court harder than he’d thought it could be.

That was then. LeBron, it seems, has learned and grown from that year of turmoil and struggle.

Dwight Howard, if he gets what he deserves — and it should be noted that doesn’t always happen — should get the same treatment as LeBron did going forward.

Already, New York tabloids have warned the New Jersey Nets against going after Howard, quite the suggestion given the fact he’s the finest center on earth. National media have already taken turns outlining, in excruciating and pinpoint detail, his shortcomings as a teammate and player and his propensity to be a coach killer.

And the coach who he’s surely killed off already, the walking dead who is Van Gundy, seemed to give Howard a taste of life as the new LeBron when he rolled out the candor to the cameras Thursday and then walked away when his two-faced star sauntered over and tried to do the old it’s-us-against-them trick.

It was beautiful, Van Gundy just walking, leaving Howard to face the fact it was about to be Howard against the world and forcing him to insult all of our intelligences as he tried to shove the lie down our throats.

That’s the other piece of the puzzle that links who LeBron was and who Howard has become: unintentional and accidental candor captured on television, the medium that when done right makes it hard to lie even to ourselves.

Most stars hide their intentions and egos and lapses from the public. Not LeBron. He unmasked it fully on live television. And not Howard, who unmasked it in a trade-me-trade-me-not-trade-me-trade-me-not farce that set up all of this. Van Gundy’s move, forced on him by his star player, simply gave us the TV moment to realize it.

Most people didn’t root against LeBron because he left Cleveland. They rooted against him because, when he left, he showed who he really was, and an unlikeable figure who had clothed himself in Nike gear, worship-me ads and marketing campaigns that made us all a little complicit for buying the lie.

LeBron got what he got despite the fact he was a free agent because he left the place that loved him and drafted him. Howard will almost certainly leave the place that loves him and drafted him, but while he’s still there, he’s ripping it apart from the inside.

That part of LeBron’s time, I hope, is over. That part of Dwight Howard’s time it seems is just beginning.

Howard has revealed himself — beyond the nickname, beyond the stats and promise, beyond the fake smiles and dishonest attempts to blame the media — as a clueless, petulant, immature and spoiled star who needs a season or two of the mockery he deserves before he can have a shot at finally growing up and being the player, person and teammate his talents deserve.