Los Angeles Lakers: Dwight Howard’s road to redemption

No matter what happens, Los Angeles Lakers center Dwight Howard has already redeemed himself.

It was not too long ago that Dwight Howard was the running joke of NBA Twitter and got cut for nothing by a Memphis Grizzlies team that lacked any depth at his position. In one season with the Los Angeles Lakers, he has redeemed his reputation both on and off the court.

The theme of Dwight Howard’s season has been redemption. No, not redemption like a religious revelation or the rebuttal round after making the last cup in beer pong, the redemption of his NBA image.

In sports, a redemption story is generally a story of a great player’s fall from grace for some reason or another to the bottom of the free agency pool and their rise back up to being a star or close to what they once were. That is what happened with Dwight Howard when the Los Angeles Lakers signed him last offseason.

When the Lakers acquired Howard on a one-year, non-guaranteed deal last August, it made headlines because he was a player that formerly spurned the Lakers, not because people thought he would help much on the court this season.

However, when he announced that he would be playing in the Orlando bubble with the Lakers earlier this week, it was a much different reaction; most Lakers’ fans were relieved because he has meant so much to the team this season.

Lake Show Life’s Ron Agers’ made a great case for how much Howard’s presence would have been missed if he decided to sit Orlando out. It was also a general consensus that it would be much harder to make a run at the title in this revamped postseason without both Howard and Avery Bradley, who announced he was opting out late last month for family reasons.

Considering the season he had, it is somewhat crazy to think that fans (myself included) were calling for the team to sign guys like Maurice Speights and Joakim Noah over Howard when DeMarcus Cousins was injured last summer.

Now he might have to be considered the most important player coming off of the Lakers bench, while those other two played a total of zero games combined before the season was stopped.

Dwight Howard is coming full circle with the Los Angeles Lakers.

The Lakers were the most ironic of all places for him to dramatically turn around his image because it is the franchise where his career arguably started to take the downward spike.

If Los Angeles was a weird location for the start of his redemption, then Orlando would be an even more ironic city to cap it off with a title. That is because it is the place where he became an NBA star and ultimately left in the dust as well, after losing his one and only finals appearance.

Yet even if Dwight does not play well in Orlando, and the Lakers do not win the championship, he has already redeemed his persona around the league, especially in the eyes of Lakers fans.  This season was not just a change in his hairstyle, he completely changed how he viewed himself, and it has helped him flourish in his new role off the bench and off the court.

In his first go-around in Los Angeles his attitude and fit with the team was a question mark, but this season it could not have been more different. His voice was one that Lakers players rallied around at times this season (like when he defended KCP on Instagram), and his bright personality was able to shine through brighter than it ever did in his first stint with the team.

On the past few teams that Howard played for, his teammates did not enjoy being around him either on or off the court. This season that has changed as well, both Kyle Kuzma and Danny Green have recently come out and said that they are excited Howard decided to play in Orlando.

What has also made Howard’s turn around even more impactful, has been his impressive push for social reform off the court. Part of the reason he was contemplating sitting out of Orlando was because he did not want the NBA to distract from the ongoing protests against racial injustice going on around the country.

But instead of deciding to sit out, he made an even better choice by deciding to donate the rest of his season’s salary to the Breath Again campaign whose goal is to “bridge gaps between races and people in order to end racism and hatred.”

In an appearance on CNN Howard explained his decision saying,

"“During my time in the bubble, I will use that time to talk about Breathe Again, and I’m going to use my salary all the money, the paychecks that I’ll be getting from going down in the bubble to help push this Breathe Again initiative, push our movement and just make sure that people don’t forget about what’s going on in our society.”"

The NBA has also mentioned that they might let the players wear social justice phrases instead of last names on their jerseys in the bubble.  It would be a safe bet that Howard would be one of the players to utilize that jersey feature and the entire bubble atmosphere, in general, to help get his message out there.

The stat that tells it all about Howard’s redemption story this season has to be the Lakers’ title odds in Vegas. When the Los Angeles Lakers initially signed him in the offseason, their title odds did not budge.

But when he decided he was going to play in Orlando almost a year later their odds jumped from the third-best to being tied with the Bucks for the best odds in the league, according to Bovada.

It was just last offseason that hardly any team in the NBA even wanted to take a look at bringing Howard into their building. Today, the Los Angeles Lakers know that they are lucky to be the ones to take a chance on him, and are even more lucky he will be joining them in the Orlando bubble.

At this point, the former superman of the league even has to be considered as one of the leading candidates for the NBA’s Comeback Player of the Year Award, and there is no better symbolic representation of redemption in the NBA than that.