Why didn’t Dwight Howard return to Lakers after 2020 title? He and Jeanie Buss clear the air

Dwight Howard was confused.

On a team led by LeBron James and Anthony Davis, Howard had been viewed as a key role player during the Lakers’ 2020 NBA championship season. But he wasn’t brought back the following season.

“I was so sad. I wanted to come back,” Howard said on this week’s episode of his “Above the Rim with DH12” podcast. “And I don’t know what had happened.”

His guest, Lakers controlling owner Jeanie Buss, was also confused — by Howard’s comment.

“You took an offer from the Philadelphia 76ers,” Buss told him.

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During a conversation that seemed genuinely warm and caring, Howard and Buss cleared the air about the end to the second — and most successful — of Howard’s three stints with the Lakers. The eight-time All-Star indicated he had been led to believe by his agent at the time that the team had no interest in re-signing him as a free agent.

Howard’s former agent was Charles Briscoe, who pleaded guilty last year in his role in defrauding Howard of $7 million in a bogus scheme to buy the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream. Briscoe worked with Calvin Darden Jr. to perpetrate the fraud, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, and was convicted earlier this month by a federal jury in Manhattan.

In a different case, Darden was convicted of cheating former NBA forward Chandler Parsons of $1 million.

“I think that we were just told so many different things,” Howard told Buss, “and I think now lookin’ back on it with the situation that I had with my agent … So, like, I don’t even know what the truth was because what I was told was that you guys didn’t have an offer for me.”

Buss responded: “Oh, no, that’s not true. We made an offer. We did.”

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Howard replied: “I never even knew that. He told me — well, actually, he said that you guys had an offer, and then he said you guys took the offer back and said, ‘No.’”

Later in the conversation, Howard double-checked.

“So y’all did have an offer for me?” he asked.

“Yes!” Buss answered.

She explained that with the NBA’s salary cap, sometimes it can be tricky to get the timing right in making contract offers to build a roster.

“I think for a player, if a team is saying, like, we have a contract but you have to wait to sign it or we gotta sign other players first, it’d just seem like you’re not a priority,” Howard said.

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Buss responded: “I can see why you would feel that way and [that’s] probably what another team trying to sign you would say to you to put us down. But that’s not who we are. And you know that.”

Both Howard and Buss agreed that the Lakers could have won additional championships had the 2020 team stayed together. Instead, several players, including Rajon Rondo, left as free agents, while the team traded away players like Danny Green and JaVale McGee.

“Do you feel like if we would’ve kept the team together we would’ve won a couple of championships?” Howard asked Buss.

Buss replied: “I think so. I feel like when you win a championship, that’s when you give the guys a chance to defend their title. … But once there was, like, three or four guys not coming back, then it wasn’t the same anyway.”

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Howard ended up signing a one-year deal with the 76ers but returned to the Lakers for 2021-22, the last of his 18 seasons in the NBA.

“It’s so good to have the conversation because now it doesn’t leave room for miscommunication. We have an understanding,” Howard said. “Because for years I was so hurt by that. … It just seemed like we had something, but it’s just like we didn’t pursue it like we should have on both ends.”

Buss added later: “We would have been better off staying together. But it was, like, a misdirection or a misunderstanding.”

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.