Being Dwight Howard has both good and bad moments. On just about any given night, you’re the most athletic and dominating player on the court. We saw that be the case in the Houston Rockets first round matchup against the Dallas Mavericks. Dwight completely dominated from time to time, whenever he wanted. Game 2 against the Mavs in particular, when he and his old AAU teammate Josh Smith connected on multiple alley-oops, Howard looked unstoppable and back to his old dominating Dwight days.
Fast forward to last night and it was nothing but a struggle for Howard to get anything going against the Los Angeles Clippers. He was in foul trouble all night and it forced the Rockets to get away from their original gameplan involving a heavy amount of Howard plays. They were forced to slow it down and utilize the ‘Hack-A-Jordan’ strategy on Clippers big man DeAndre Jordan. As you can only guess, it didn’t work. Jordan abused the Rockets even when Howard was on the floor.
Howard’s frustration reached a high when he was ejected in the fourth quarter, with the Rockets down 27 and Blake Griffin charging the rim, once again. Howard fouled Griffin hard and he committed his sixth foul on the night but for a reason not explained to anyone, he was assessed a second technical for his interaction with the referee so he was also ejected. Which I guess are the same thing?
Either way, Clippers point guard, either full of confidence or just wanting a fellow player to remain in the game, elected to try and lobby for Dwight to remain in the game.
Following was reported by TNT’s sideline reporter, Tracy Wolfson.
During that review, it was interesting. Chris Paul was down there trying to get the refs’ attention. He wanted to tell them not to throw Dwight Howard out, because he said wants him to play.
That’s what he continued to tell his teammates. He said, “Tell the ref. Tell the refs. We want him to play. You can’t throw him out.”
At the end of the day, Dwight did get ejected. It might have been a little bit of a dig from Chris Paul because Howard did struggle. He finished the game with only 7 points, 6 rebounds in 18 minutes of action. So yes, he did have the same amount of fouls as he did rebounds.
The other issue Dwight had was during the game. As you can tell, an already frustrated Dwight didn’t want anything else irking him but leave it to a fan to go at Howard and just try to get under his skin a little bit more.
I don’t know how much of a ‘threat’ this is, but Howard clearly is telling a fan to come down to where he is. Maybe to make him play in the game. Dwight never makes it clear what he wants the fan to do so I wouldn’t get too worked up into ‘threats’. It wasn’t anything like what Joakim Noah experienced with a fan last week or what Matt Barnes went through with James Harden’s mom so I wouldn’t expect there to be any repercussions coming out of this one.
