![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/GettyImages-88076742-scaled-e1756934999855.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWhen the NBA released its all-time top-75 players list in 2021, two glaring omissions stood out.<\/p>\n
The obvious one, which only looks more glaringly ridiculous as time passes, was Nikola Joki\u0107.<\/p>\n
The other was Dwight Howard, whose career remains underappreciated even as he prepares to be inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame on Saturday. While comparing players from different eras is always challenging, Howard\u2019s career resume \u2014 five straight first-team All-NBA selections, three Defensive Player of the Year awards and four top-five finishes in the MVP race, among other highlights \u2014 is overwhelming even by the standards of that list.<\/p>\n
In a Hall of Fame induction week that also includes one his contemporaries, Carmelo Anthony, it\u2019s jarring to consider that Anthony made the top-75 list without a second thought when his first-team All-NBA appearances (zero), top-five MVP finishes (one) and NBA Finals appearances (zero) don\u2019t quite stack up against Howard\u2019s total. I say this not to dunk on Melo; go through that top-75 list, and it\u2019s jarring how many other selections about whom the same can be said. In fact, every other player with five first-team All-NBA selections as of 2021 made that list.<\/p>\n
For those of you more persuaded by rinngggzzzz discussions, consider this part: Howard was, by far, the best player and the only superstar on an NBA Finals team. We\u2019re already getting into rare air when we look at that list; go through that top 75 again and take note of how many of those great players don\u2019t qualify on that score.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ll get a similar result on the back half of that 75 if you ask yourself, \u201cWas this guy ever considered the best player at his position in the league, or one of the top two players in the league?\u201d<\/p>\n
Somehow, Howard\u2019s half-decade of dominance from 2006-07 to 2010-11 gets swept under the carpet. Part of that is because he is remembered more for the second half of his career than the first, when back issues sapped some of his overwhelming athleticism and other silliness got in the way of his career arc. Part is because his best years came in small-market Orlando, and his biggest-stage moment in that stretch was a disappointing 2009 finals against the Los Angeles Lakers. Part is because he wasn\u2019t the guy with the ball in his hands, for the most part, with no shooting range and a rudimentary bag in the post consisting mostly of short jump hooks.<\/p>\n
The many narratives that took over the second half of his career have caused some people to more or less forget about how awesome the first half was.<\/p>\n
Howard wasn\u2019t just the dominating force on some random team that backed its way into the finals via a weak Eastern Conference. His peak years came basically at the only moment in the last three decades where the East was loaded.<\/p>\n
In particular, his 2009 Magic team had to beat a 62-win, defending-champion Boston Celtics team \u2014 including winning Game 7 on the road \u2014 just to make the conference finals. (Yes, Kevin Garnett was injured, but so was Orlando\u2019s entire starting backcourt). Then, the Magic knocked out a 66-win Cleveland team with LeBron James. Aside from the Celtics, Howard\u2019s Magic were the only East team from 2007 to 2018 to keep James out of the NBA Finals.<\/p>\n
That series win over Cleveland was all Howard, too. He destroyed the Cavs\u2019 front line, averaging 25.8 points and 13.0 rebounds for the series and tallying a dominant 40 points and 14 rebounds in the clinching Game 6.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Led by a dominating series from Howard, the Orlando Magic won the Eastern Conference finals in six games over the Cleveland Cavaliers. (Doug Benc \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t just Howard\u2019s production; it was the mere threat of him trucking to the rim that created all kinds of mayhem on the perimeter. The Magic wisely maximized this by putting four 3-point shooters around him \u2014 ahead of their time in the game\u2019s evolution \u2014 and led the league in 3-point rate (the percentage of field-goal attempts from 3) for four straight seasons. Quietly, this team changed the game.<\/p>\n
Ironically, even though Howard himself was a hopeless 3-point shooter, his presence was the only thing that generated so many 3s. He was basically a tractor beam sucking in help defenders who were hell-bent on taking away an easy dunk, thus a conduit to countless open corner 3s for the likes of Rashard Lewis and Courtney Lee.<\/p>\n
While other great bigs of the late \u201990s and aughts created 3s by passing out of the post, Howard created them without ever touching the ball. His charges to the rim generated 3s because he had the gravity of several suns.<\/p>\n
At 6-foot-10, Howard could outjump everyone and he finished everything, mostly with two-footed, two-hand dunks. More importantly, he had quick feet and insane hands. Just going through 2009 playoff clips, some of his traffic catches off line-drive passes are wild. (Pardon the standard definition.)\u00a0A lot of bigs would have taken these passes right off their faces:<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, peak Howard was one of the game\u2019s all-time great defenders, an elite rim protector who could scoot up and down the floor in transition and hold his own defending the perimeter. Although like virtually every big of that time, he mostly played drop coverage.<\/p>\n
The 2009 Magic finished first in defensive efficiency despite not exactly employing a murderer\u2019s row of defenders around Howard. They were first again in 2010 and third in 2011, with Howard winning Defensive Player of the Year in all three seasons. All three votes were overwhelming, too, with Howard getting more than 85 percent of the vote in each.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s look at tape from the 2009 Eastern Conference finals. The Synergy data says the Cavs went at Howard 27 times in pick-and-roll in a Game 4 defeat and then abruptly dialed it back in the last two games after it was not working. While some of their empty trips came on missed pull-up jumpers against the drop, a lot of them looked like this:<\/p>\n
As a reminder, the ballhandler here is prime LeBron James. Him coming downhill against a retreating big man was a problem, a five-alarm emergency that either sucked in help defenders or resulted in a big ending up on the business end of a highlight.<\/p>\n
Except, that is, if you had prime Howard waiting at the rim:<\/p>\n
In that case, you could just deal with the matchup without sending extra bodies, and the Cavs\u2019 role players would starve:<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not like the Magic shut him down; James averaged 38.5 points for the series. But he needed to take all the shots to do it, because Orlando didn\u2019t need to send nearly as much help his way as most opponents.<\/p>\n
Howard\u2019s five-year run in Orlando was so strong that the rest of his career could be pretty \u201cmeh\u201d and he\u2019d still rate as one of the all-time great players. The last part wasn\u2019t \u201cmeh,\u201d though many might remember it that way, but it wasn\u2019t at the level of those first five seasons. (Howard made All-Star teams in L.A. and Houston, led the league in rebounding in his first tour with the Lakers and won a title as a defensive specialist in his second stint.)<\/p>\n
As many of you know, I have a formula called \u201cGOAT Points\u201d designed to measure career strength. Howard ranks 35th all time, which is astoundingly high for a player who was left off the all-time 75 list. (Every other player who would have been in the GOAT Points top 50 in 2021 made it except Tracy McGrady. Do we need to investigate for potential voting bias against Magic-to-Rockets careers?)<\/p>\n
Perhaps we\u2019re too spoiled by having James, Steph Curry and Kevin Durant dominate the league for two decades, but five-year runs like the one Howard had are historic. Even all-timers like Garnett, Chris Paul, Dirk Nowitzki and Moses Malone only had four first-team All-NBA selections for their entire careers. Once you get work past the golden realm of the top 30 or so players in NBA history, nobody has a half-decade that can touch Howard\u2019s.<\/p>\n
As we celebrate Howard\u2019s career this weekend, let\u2019s not think about what the second half of his career might have been, but rather how underrated the first part remains. His dominant half-decade in Orlando remains bizarrely overlooked in the chronicles of the league\u2019s history.<\/p>\n
(Top photo: Elsa \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the NBA released its all-time top-75 players list in 2021, two glaring omissions stood out. The obvious…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":134453,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[6417,11949,5050,1055,355,11950,2113,99,11948],"class_list":["post-134452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-atlanta-hawks","tag-charlotte-hornets","tag-houston-rockets","tag-los-angeles-lakers","tag-nba","tag-orlando-magic","tag-philadelphia-76ers","tag-sports","tag-washington-wizards"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/134453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}