NBA basketball functions much differently than it did when Dwight Howard joined the league just over 20 years ago. Most obvious is the recent emphasis on 3-pointers, which has trickled down to big men like Karl-Anthony Towns, Nikola Jokic and Kristaps Porzingis, who are now able to stretch the court themselves.
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Most centers no longer camp out in the paint waiting for a post-up, but even for those who haven’t developed reliable 3-point shots, the game is still nearly unrecognizable from its recent past. Take Giannis Antetokounmpo, for example, who’s often the biggest Buck on the court and their ostensible center.
Giannis is arguably the most athletic player in the NBA, and he gets most of his points by facing up and getting to the rim at will. Who’s going to get in front of someone who has more than earned the nickname the Greek Freak?
Being so big and athletic gives Giannis the license to play the game his way, but it’s an interesting thought experiment to wonder what his game would look like if he didn’t play in the current era of pace and space.
During the early part of his career, Dwight Howard was also thought of as one of the strongest and most athletic players in the league. He recently joined the Club 520 podcast to discuss the subject.
“I think that [Giannis] is a Dwight Howard that could play with handles and be able to go full court and all that stuff,” Howard said. “In my era, they wouldn’t have allowed the bigs to do all that, and he just came in at the right time where he could play one-on-one as a 5, full court, bring the ball down.”
Howard isn’t necessarily saying that he would have played like Giannis if given the chance, but he made it clear that in his day, he didn’t even have the opportunity to try. “I remember playing in Orlando, the coaches every time I dribbled the ball, they’d tell them to come take it, don’t dribble. So that’s the only thing I could do was the jump hooks and dunk the ball.”
Would Giannis have been pigeonholed the same way? On his appearance on The Pat McAfee Show in March, LeBron James said Giannis would have 250 points in a game in the 1970s. An exaggeration? Definitely. But Giannis’ unique skill set and overpowering athleticism would have been nearly impossible to ignore back then.
That’s how revolutions take place, when one player is just so undeniable that the game has no choice but to change. Steph Curry did it with the 3-pointer, and Wilt Chamberlain did it by dominating inside. Giannis almost surely would have had a similar impact.
Antetokounmpo is one of the best players in the league right now, and he would have been at any other point in history as well. The more interesting question is, if Dwight Howard came along today, would he be the same player, or would he play more like Giannis?
