Dwight Flight - Explaining the Howard Trade

Dwight Howard has gone and bounced to LA, proving that just because it’s the offseason and the Olympics are top billing, doesn’t mean the basketball hot stove has stopped a-cooking. Some stupid people don’t understand exactly what happened with the Dwight Howard trade. (I can't tell you which ones, but my Twitter Butler tells me they're embarrassing themselves.) With that in mind, our resident basketball expert (me) explains how Dwight Howard went to LA. Not, like, how he got on the plane and so on, but the other stuff involving basketball, which is more important, I think.

Dumbass: So what happened?
VICE: Dwight Howard got traded to the Lakers.

I knew that. The old guy? Are you sure? Why would the Lakers want him?
No that’s Juwan Howard. He just re-upped with the Heat for another five years. This is Dwight.

Superman? The high school player from Georgia? 
Yeah.

I haven't read about him at all this year. Tell me a bit about him.
Well, Dwight Howard is the dorkiest, and also the most broad-shouldered, player in the NBA. He’s about 26 now, or something, and has been playing since he got drafted by the Magic ahead of Emeka Okafor in 2004, which some people, most of whom are not in the process of making basketball decisions anymore, thought was a mistake. He had a year left on his contract in Orlando, and almost got traded to Brooklyn, but the amazing package the team got wasn't enough, I guess. Defensively he’s elite, mostly because of his giant wingspan, which is 7’4, as well as his basketball skills, which are limited but immense.

Wait, limited how?
He can’t really score. He can only dunk.

Like that giant redhead baby from LA?
Yeah, exactly. Both Blake Griffin and Dwight Howard have a very limited offensive arsenal. To put it plainly, they can’t really, how you call it, shoot the basketball. They are no good at what is a very obscure skillset for professional basketball players. Basically, they make their American money on defense and running fast, as well as on dunking and their disgusting, too-tall genes.

Why is it disgusting? I love reading about tall people online.  
Have you ever seen someone over 6’6 riding the train? It’s enough to make you want to puke. It's made me vomit. I’ve never seen an extremely tall person look anything other than dim. It makes me nervous. So all tall people are weird mutants, but then all NBA players are weird.

Weird how? Is Dwight a good fit for LA? The team and the city.
Well, Dwight works for the Lakers since he’s an immediate improvement over Bynum. He outclasses him defensively and holds his own offensively. Dwight is, aside from his free-throw shooting--a skill-set so impotent you'd think he'd have committed hara kiri by now--a pretty pick-of-the-crop offensive player. In other words, he’s not shit. Plus, the Lakers have Steve Nash, who's a Hall of Famer on the strentgth of getting dim shooters offensively involved, not to mention Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol. There are some downsides, to be sure: Kobe has played more minutes at his age than pretty much anyone in NBA history. Pau Gasol is unpleasant to look at, and while Bynum isn't a stud or anything, he and these shirts are now on the way out. Howard, to his credit, has an OK mustache.

So the rich get richer? Wasn’t the NBA’s new collective bargaining agreement supposed to have fixed that?
Well, in a ways it did. The Knicks, for example, were stupid babies and didn’t sign Jeremy Lin—or Landry Fields—because they didn’t want to pay what really are exorbitant tax rates on extra salary monies. But, yeah, the Lakers don’t care, and they dropped that money and now they’re a favorite to reach the Western Conference finals, and can theoretically make the money back. That said, it was a four-team trade; the only team to really get a crappy return was Orlando, and word is it's because the owner made it happen. Which is always dumb and something no CBA can fix.

So you're saying the Knicks screwed up? And what about Howard in LA, the city?
Yeah, absolutely. Oh, the city. Well, Tom Scharpling once said Los Angeles is like New Jersey with better stuff and better weather—I think he said something about weather—and if that’s not the straight dope then I’m taking a cold shower. Dwight Howard could theoretically take advantage out of living in LA, say, by getting a helicopter like Kobe once said he'd do, or avoiding the disgusting tall people pratfalls by getting a second apartment in Pasadena so he can hit up the Rose Bowl and buy old jeans and tour jackets and stuff. Maybe he could also get neck tattoos, buy a Richard Neutra house and go boogie-boarding and screen The Killing of a Chinese Bookie for Phyllis Diller and other cool LA people. But he won’t.

Why won’t he?
Well, he's a known dweeb, and the abovementioned activities are dweeb anathema. Dwight will probably get a second personal chef from the Cheesecake Factory and spend his days off doing lunges and hitting Spago. Look, he’s the biggest dork in the NBA. The only cool thing he’s ever done is get involved with Candy Supathroat.

Wait, who?
This chick. It’s not really news, and no one knows to what extent they did get involved, and I'm certainly not saying he did, but it’s a pretty good rumor and an amazing Twitter to follow, and she's on WorldStar.

Anything else, like about basketball?
Nah, not really. It’s the NBA, so you’re going to have to wait until late May to see if this all works out.

@SamReiss_