The Painful, Promising Future of Dwight Howard

Imagine your town has recently built a statue of a 12-year-old boy making a blowjob pantomime. A big, bronze tribute to contemptible juvenalia, with its tongue in its cheek, its hand making the universal sign for "holding a dick," and a plaque at its feet with a quote lifted from the LOLBOOBS subreddit. Now think about what this monument would look like decades later, its features still discernible, but corroded by acid rain, its color having turned pale green. Maybe it's covered in bird poop. The statue of that jerky kid has seen better days, you might remark.

This is all to say Dwight Howard is looking long in the tooth. The NBA's preeminent spiritual 12-year-old is pushing 30, with over 850 games on his internal odometer, and he has been deteriorating for a while. He's set to miss at least a month with edema in his right knee. This will be his second extended break of the season. The Rockets are no longer counting on him to contribute significantly to their win total and are instead aiming to assure he's healthy for the playoffs. Howard is transitioning into the phase of his career in which the regular season is more obstacle than exercise. He must find a way to coax three or four months of great basketball from his body, hoping like hell that two of those months are May and June.

If you can put Howard's rejected Martin character personality to one side, you will understand this is sad. At 29, he should be at the peak of his powers. Instead, he is markedly diminished. He hasn't been completely right since undergoing back surgery in the spring of 2012 and looks like his former self only in fits and starts. For a few games, he's spinning and scoring and claiming dominion over the paint on defense, but then his play tails off a bit, because he can't handle the daily grind anymore. Though Howard is still largely very good, he's a player for whom "very good" is several notches below satisfactory. You can see him struggling to cope with this reality, like he's a falcon who one day woke up a pigeon and is learning all over again how to fly.

Big men are not given to sudden mid-career renaissances, which means we have probably seen the end of Howard's prime. The MVP candidate who carried an underpowered Orlando Magic team to the NBA Finals in 2009 is gone. But it's not as if Howard is going down in a Ralph Sampson-esque inferno. His decline doesn't have to be a demise.

Back in 2013, Howard, responding to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's disparagement of his "basketball IQ," said: "You can't win three Defensive Player of the Year awards and be stupid." This is the most convincing self-defense Howard has ever offered, because it's true. It is hard, even when you're 6-foot-11 and built like a cliff face, to protect the rim the way Howard does. It takes, not just length and leaping ability, but superior positioning and instincts—the sorts of things you learn only through study and practice. Let it be said that, for once, Kareem was wrong and Dwight was right: he's a very smart player.

Howard's intelligence will only become more apparent as his athleticism continues to erode and what he does begins to look, increasingly, like work. If this will not make him beloved—he needs a personality transplant in order for that to happen—it will at least humanize him. We are awed by athletes who make the difficult look easy, but we also like ones who get the job done effortfully. Kobe wasn't fully appreciated until he was a bit past his sell-by date, using guile as much as anything else in order to score. Dwight could follow a similar path over the coming years, not quite resembling the dominant force he was in his mid-20s, but still getting his points and erasing lay-ups because he knows where to be and what to do.

It is, of course, no more noble to play well through old age than it is to excel in one's youth, and on-court performance has nothing to do with what a player is like off it. Surely, if Howard is given the elder statesman tag by fans and media a couple seasons from now, he will undercut it by making a fart joke in an otherwise serious sit-down interview with Mike Wilbon or by Instagramming himself doing some sort of mime routine that is funny only to him and people he pays to tell him as much. Dwight will always be Dwight, and that is irksome, but it also means he is likely to find a way to produce some excellent basketball, whether his body fully cooperates or not. That, finally, is something to appreciate about him.