Tonight’s Rockets-Hawks game featured Dwight Howard returning to Houston to face his old team for the first time since leaving this past off-season.. Before the game, James Harden shared some of the reasons why things didn’t work when Dwight Howard was his teammate in Houston. Harden gave the following quote to TNT:
“Just personalities. We never got into any arguments and cursed each other out or anything. That’s the crazy part,” Harden told TNT. “In life, just two people just can’t get along. What I mean is that on the court it just doesn’t work — it doesn’t mesh.”
Harden took the high road with his comments, as there is no reason to dig up any past animosity with his current Rockets team performing so well. Dwight Howard had a slightly different take on what happened between them.
“I thought that after we went to the Western Conference Finals that we were really going to take off. But it didn’t happen that way. I want to say part of it was because the communication wasn’t there between me and James. We allowed outside sources to manipulate our thoughts and things like that.”
Whatever the cause of the dysfunction was, Howard and Harden are better off apart than together, as both players are having good seasons for their respective teams. The Hawks ended up defeating Houston by a score of 113-108, led by a 23 point, 24 rebound explosion from Howard.