The Los Angeles Lakers could have won two more championships after their 2020 win had Dwight Howard stayed on the team, according to both Howard and team owner Jeanie Buss.
“Do you feel like if we would’ve kept the team together we would’ve won a couple of championships?” Howard asked Buss on his podcast, “Above the Rim with DH12.”
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.”
The Contract That Never Happened
However, his decision to sign with the Philadelphia 76ers was not made by either Howard or Buss, but rather due to misinformation from his agent, according to the Los Angeles Times.
During the podcast, published on Oct. 14, the eight-time All-Star discovered that Buss had made an offer for him to return to the Lakers, a team still led in the Western Conference by LeBron James and Anthony Davis.
“I was so sad. I wanted to come back. And I don’t know what had happened,” Howard said.
“You took an offer from the Philadelphia 76ers,” Buss said.
“I think that we were just told so many different things, and I think now lookin’ back on it with the situation that I had with my agent…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,” Howard said.
“Oh, no, that’s not true. We made an offer. We did,” Buss said.
“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,’” Howard said.
The actions of Howard’s agent, Charles Briscoe, did not affect Howard’s earnings, as he had a one-year contract with the Lakers in 2019-2020 worth a little more than $2.5 million. He later signed an identical one-year contract with the 76ers for the 2020-2021 season.
Briscoe, alongside Atlanta-based businessman Calvin Darden Jr., was involved in a fraud case that targeted both Howard and former NBA player Chandler Parsons, convincing them to send $7 million and $1 million in a money-laundering scheme to purchase the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream, according to the Department of Justice.
The money was sent to a shell company controlled by Darden, who was informed by Howard’s former agent, Briscoe, that the $7 million funds were not actually going toward purchasing the Dream. Darden used $3.7 million to acquire a mansion, luxury cars, Basquiat paintings, and other personal goods.
Darden allegedly lied to Howard by claiming celebrities like Tyler Perry and companies like Starbucks were willing to sponsor the Dream. Howard only learned of the scam when ESPN reported that someone else had purchased the team.
Darden had a prior fraud conviction in 2005 in New York. For the $8 million scam, he was found guilty of fraud, money laundering, bank fraud, and conspiracy counts.
Briscoe pleaded guilty to his role in the scheme and was sentenced to three years of supervised release, with the first six months under home detention, and was ordered to forfeit $1.5 million, according to the Bakhtiari & Harrison law firm. The agency reports that Howard was one of four other NBA players whom the disgraced agent defrauded in his $13 million scheme.
Despite all that has happened to him, Howard expressed a sense of closure knowing that the Lakers wanted him back, double checking with Buss that he was not deceived again: “So y’all did have an offer for me?”
“Yes!” Buss 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,” Howard said.
“We would have been better off staying together. But it was, like, a misdirection or a misunderstanding,” Buss said.
Howard is currently playing overseas for a Twainese basketball team, Taiwan Mustangs, a team he is a part-time owner of, according to Bleacher Report.
In the podcast, he jokingly sang to Buss asking to be resigned to the Lakers.
