Can Dwight Howard get back in the MVP conversation? (USATSI)
Hakeem Olajuwon thinks Dwight Howard is ready to have an MVP-type year. Speaking with NBA.com's Fran Blinebury, the Hall of Famer said the Houston Rockets center is finally fully healthy and should be better than last season:
“I could see last year when I worked with him in camp that there were some things that he could not do. Or they were things that he did not think he could do. The difference now is that he is fit and those doubts are gone. This is the player who can go back to being the best center in the league and the kind of player that can lead his team to a championship. I think he should be dominant at both ends of the floor.”
…“I played at a time when were so many players that could win the MVP each year — Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone. It meant you weren't going to win the MVP every year. But you had to play like an MVP and have your name in the conversation. I believe that's where Dwight is now. He is healthy. He is physically fit. He is strong. He wants to win.
“It is about attitude. He should have a season that makes everyone vote for him as MVP. If that happens, they should be contenders for the championship. I believe that. Now they have to believe it.”
Olajuwon isn't exactly an unbiased observer, given his relationship with the Rockets and the many hours he's spent working with Howard. He also, unsurprisingly, championed the importance of centers. It's notable, though, that Olajuwon thinks Howard is on a different level than he was during his first year in Houston.
Howard was great last season. He averaged 18.3 points, 12.2 rebounds and 1.8 blocks per game, shooting 59 percent from the field. In the playoffs against the Portland Trail Blazers, he raised his game and appeared just about unstoppable on the block. He didn't make the All-Defensive team, though, and while he improved over the course of the season, he never looked quite as good as he did at his peak in Orlando.
At the beginning of training camp, Howard told Yahoo Sports' Adrian Wojnarowski that he'd talked to Olajuwon about being more consistent and approaching regular-season games the way he'd handled postseason ones. He sees the Rockets as title contenders, and it's obvious to everyone that there will be more on his shoulders. With Chandler Parsons, Jeremy Lin and Omer Asik out of the picture, Houston has less overall talent than it did at the beginning of the summer. The hope is that Howard and James Harden up their games so that won't matter.
After the 2012-2013 Los Angeles Lakers debacle and his back trouble, some have probably forgotten just how much of a force Howard was a few years ago. He finished second in MVP voting behind LeBron James in 2011, and there was a reasaonble argument that he should have won it due to being the most irreplaceable player. Back then he was the NBA's most impactful defender, its scariest threat off of the pick-and-roll and a magnet for double teams in the post. When Olajuwon says Howard can be "dominant at both ends of the floor," that's where your mind should go. Will he ever play at that level again? We'll find out.
Basketball Hot News
Suns coach Hornacek says shortening games won’t help teams rest their stars
The NBA will experiment with a 44-minute game in this Sunday’s preseason contest between the Nets and the Celtics, in what is widely viewed as a compromised attempt to help reduce wear and tear on the league’s biggest stars.
The real answer, of course, would be to reduce the number of regular season games that currently appear on the 82-game schedule. But since the owners aren’t in a hurry to give up all of the revenue that would be associated with doing so, this is a creative attempt at an alternative option.
There have been plenty of opinions on the matter to this point, and Suns head coach Jeff Hornacek provided yet another one on Thursday. Essentially, he believes (much like Pacers coach Frank Vogel does) that shortening the games could potentially have the opposite of the desired effect.
From Kevin Zimmerman of Valley of the Suns:
“I think it was brought up that it could save the legs of the stars,” Hornacek said Thursday. “Then somebody else made the point, well, the shorter game is going to make the beginning more important. If all of a sudden the rest of the game is going to be more important, you’re probably going to lean to playing those stars more now, because you don’t have the time to make it up.”
Even if the stars didn’t play more as Hornacek suggests, it’s unlikely that they’d play any less — making Vogel’s point about managing minutes for his reserves all the more valid.
Nets head coach Lionel Hollins said that the shorter game idea was about television, and the league’s broadcast partners wanting to fit them into an allotted time slot.
There are probably multiple reasons fueling this idea, and shorter games in general aren’t likely to impact the quality of the product on the floor in a negative fashion. But this also isn’t likely to address the very real issue of the game’s better players being overworked during the course of the regular season.
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