"fuck stairs, he can just jump up floors."

p mac, lamar blogom's spiritual guide contributed much of the material for this post, including but not limited to the title and the below awesome video.
dwight howard is basically a small child in a grown-ass man's body. he is figuratively a boy among men. that boyish quality both gives him a limitless ceiling and defines him as a player. he is, don't get me wrong, an absolute specimen of what a person looks like when he is the buffest and bounciest he can be. he honestly has bounce that puts his own body in danger whenever he flies to the rim. i wouldn't be terribly surprised if he ended his own career through some bounce-related incident.

anyways. he is not lebron james. lebron was and is a very mature, very self-possessed young man. he does not slip up on or off the court with the semi-notable exception of the hummer scandal in his high school days. dwight is prone to walking around talking like borat and riding roller coasters with his homeys. while screaming. and being on videotape. and with people around who might doubt his hardness.

i say that because he is the functional opposite of ron artest. whereas ron-ron is obsessed with his tru warrier persona and all of its trappings, dwight has seemingly very little conception about what people think of him. his game is not as polished or flowing as we've come to expect from a "good" player. even as rough around the edges as he currently is, he plays at an all star level. that very fact kind of makes me shudder at what he will become when he developes a good repetoire of post moves and no longer has to rely on his unsafe hops.