Dwight Howard puts cap on Jalen Rose’s revelation about a conversation he and Kobe Bryant had before they teamed up in LA.
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After getting knocked out of the Playoffs in two consecutive Western Conference Semifinals in 2011 and 2012, Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers decided that they needed fresh legs for the upcoming season.
They managed to get hold of 5x All NBA first team member and 3x Defensive Player of the Year, Dwight Howard in the off-season. But nothing besides adding one of the best players in the league to their squad worked their way in the following years.
And according to Jalen Rose, Kobe knew it all along since his first conversation with Dwight before he joined his new squad. It was 5 years after Jalen had called it a day in NBA, but the former Pacers star tells the story in a detailed fashion. He revealed the conversation between Kobe and Dwight on Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson’s “All The Smoke” podcast.
“I was speaking at his camp the day he heard Dwight Howard was gonna get traded to them,” Rose said. “So Kob take the call. I was sitting there. I might have heard some of the conversations, and I might have heard Dwight asking him about LA and, you know, some of the off-the-court things. Kobe got off the phone and said, ‘This s–t ain’t gonna work.’ This Is before he even laced up with him one time. He said, ‘His head ain’t right. I’m here to help you get championships. You’re asking me about producers?’ He’s like, ‘This ain’t gonna work.’”
Dwight Howard shuts down Jalen Rose’s Kobe Bryant revelation
Rose told the story saying he was right there when the duo spoke for the first time and said Dwight “might” have asked Bryant about the non-basketball stuff in LA. But the Lakers star has now come forward to silence Jalen on his take saying “none of it ever happened”.
Whether any of it happened or not, Howard’s move to the Lakers didn’t work out for the humble giant or the Purple and Gold team in any way. Although Dwight got two more All-Star appearances after the infamous move, the world-class duo failed to take the Lakers even through the first round of the 2013 Playoffs getting swept at the hands of the San Antonio Spurs.
That set Dwight on the move again in the off-season after just one season in LA. Following that, several statements from Bryant came up in the media in which he’d call the big man “soft” and various other things along that line.
None of the two stars would again win a championship until Howard came back for a cameo with the Lakers in 2020. But as fate would have it Kobe wouldn’t be alive to watch him lift the Larry O’Brien for the Purple and Gold.
