On June 20, the Charlotte Hornets traded center Dwight Howard to the Brooklyn Nets, getting Timofey Mozgov, two second-round picks and some cash. The former No.1 center of the league has been traded by his home team for third consecutive years, and the Nets may be the sixth teams he played for.
Howard’s peak period was his 2007-2012 season in the Magic. During this time, he was honored as No.1 center in the NBA. He led the Magic to the NBA Finals in the 2009-2010 season, but lost to the Los Angeles Lakers in 1-4. He won the NBA Defensive Player of the Year for the third consecutive time in 2009-11, and the NBA All-Star team 8 times in 2007-2014. When he went to the Lakers in 2013 and spent an unpleasant season, he was also in the late career due to injuries and age.
Last season, Howard was still able to get good data on the Hornets, but the NBA field is no longer dominated by the post players. The small ball trend led by Stephen Curry has become the main style of NBA, which is also the reason for the decline of a heavy center like Howard. Dwight Howard has become the last dinosaur in this era.
Let's take a look at the offensive style of this center. Post up have always been his biggest offensive way of attacking, and his scoring season with the highest score is only 0.928 points per round, but it goes back to the 2010-11 season. As you can see, his post-up only scored 0.83 points per turn in the 2017-18 season. On the premise that post up have been seen as a less efficient form of offense in NBA, his post up time per game averaged third in all NBA players, second only to Joel Embiid (averaging 9.41 per game, per round 0.97 points) and LaMarcus Aldridge (9.39 per game, 0.99 points per round).
From the above comparison, we can see that, compared with the peak season of 2010-2011, with the decline of physical ability and team status, Howard's attempts and field goals percentage in the painted area dropped significantly. Correspondingly, he added the attempts of jump shot near the free throw line. This is a valuable change for him, but the effect is not as good as he imagined.
We can analyze Howard's contribution to team today from higher-order data, from the above we can see that all datas of Howard have declined in varying degrees after 2011. His TS% was only 57.7% in last season, ranking 95th in the league, which is a bit bad ranking for the center. At the same time, his PER and WS have also fallen a lot compared to the peak period, which means that he no longer has such a huge influence on the outcome of the game. The only high-level data that had rebounded last season was utilization rate, because Hornets coach Clifford gave him enough support in tactics. It is worth mentioning that coach Clifford was fired after the end of the season because of poor record.
Howard is still able to make a contribution to the game today, but considering the disharmonious factors he may cause in the locker room and the growing age, before signing him, any playoff team need to think about how much he can use for the team.
Data from: NBA.com, Hupu
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