Dwight Howard learned during the week that he will be playing for his sixth team in eight seasons following a trade from Charlotte to Brooklyn. While that is certainly newsworthy, what’s also interesting is the way he learned about the trade.
Howard said in a radio interview on “Steve Gorman SPORTS!” on FOX Sports Radio during the week that he learned about the deal through a comment on Instagram.
“Well with the situation of me getting traded, one it was kind of blindsided. I literally found out right before I was about to do a charity event, and also I found out on Instagram,” Howard told hosts Caron Butler, Steve and Jeffrey Gorman. “I found out through the comment section of one of my pictures, so I was in total shock about the whole situation.
“I wasn’t upset about the fact that I was traded to Brooklyn, it was more so the shock because I thought that I had a really good year this year. And when they said I was going to Brooklyn I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to go in there, and make the best of the situation.’ Actually what I think is going to happen is there’s going to be a buy out and I will make myself a free agent for the summer.”
Howard also addressed the report that he was disliked by his Hornets teammates.
“I just think it’s a lot of people making up a lot of different stories and they come up with this narrative about who I am. My grandma has always told me a lie don’t care who tells it and that’s how I look at it. A lot of people are saying a lot of things about me that is unfair,” Howard said.
“My main thing is that I just want to go out there and win and give a team, any team I’ve been on, the best of me,” he continued. “I came into this league at 18. When you come in at a young age, people see all of your mistakes. This is not like going to college, just basically being out in the public eye, we are in the public eye every single day. So every mistake that I’ve made, everything that’s happened in my past is put out there publicly. It basically gave people an opinion based off of what they’ve heard and stuff like that. And maybe a little bit of my actions have made people feel a certain type of way and I really want that to change, because it’s really not who I am. I’ve never been that way. There’s no way I could be winning community assist awards to be the best person in the community, but be a bad teammate, that doesn’t really go well together.
“I’m not that type of person and I totally hate that, and I really want to do what I can to change that because it’s not right. I’m trying my best. And any teammate that’s ever felt that way, I would love for them to come out and say it’s them, put an address on it so this can be cleared out and we can move forward.”
The bad teammate talk has followed Dwight for a while. One of his ex-Atlanta teammates did not have the most flattering things to say about him. And back when he was with the Lakers, Howard had friction with Kobe Bryant.
Now 32, the aging Howard doesn’t have much time left to turn around his reputation.
