Dwight Howard
Dwight Howard
Dwight David Howard is an American professional basketball player for the Atlanta Hawks of the National Basketball Association. Howard, who plays center, had an outstanding high school career at Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy. He chose to forgo college and entered the 2004 NBA draft, and was selected first overall by the Orlando Magic. An eight-time All-Star, eight-time All-NBA team selection, five-time All-Defensive member, and three-time Defensive Player of the Year, Howard has been ranked consistently as one of the best...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBasketball Player
Date of Birth8 December 1985
CityAtlanta, GA
CountryUnited States of America
We're trying to send a message to teams that when they come into our house they are going to have a tough game ahead of them.
It's not good to lose a big lead. We've got to bury teams when we get 'em down. This is like the second or third time where a team has come back and we had to make an extra push to win the game. When we get teams down, we've got to keep 'em down and not let 'em come back.
They can still go to me in the fourth quarter. It's just something I've got to keep working on. That's one of the areas I've got to gain more confidence in. Guys from other teams have told me they see that I'm too tense when I'm shooting free throws, when I'm concentrating so much instead of just letting it flow.
This win was real big. Coach ( Brian Hill ) said that we have three teams coming up with Miami (April 9), Dallas and San Antonio (April 13) and we wanted to get all three teams.
Our coach said before the game, we got three good teams coming up in Miami, Dallas and San Antonio. We want to go out and try to beat all three teams. We started off tonight with a good win.
We felt we really beat them down tonight.
The season isn't over. Maybe a trade, maybe the All-Star break, something will jump-start us. Hopefully, the switch will come on.
We really needed a win tonight, especially on the road. My mind-set tonight was to really focus in on bearing down and getting a win. I wanted to do everything in my will to get that win tonight.
We can win games at home. But we seem to lose focus on the road.
We had a lot of careless mistakes but I think that our defensive pressure was not there the whole game. We gave them easy baskets on our turnovers and that's one thing our coaches have been impressing on us all year.
That's the secret to success -- not worrying only about what's going to happen in the future, trying to work only on the stuff you can work on in the present.
It feels good. From the get-go, we knew we could beat these guys. The story all year has been us not playing up to our potential, not playing as well as we can. When we do that, we lose, and that happened a lot earlier in the season. We've learned that we have to come out with the kind of intensity we had tonight every night.
We just came out slow. We came out with the energy that we needed in the second half, but we didn't come out like we were ready to play tonight. We can't do that if we want to win.
Man, we're supposed to get wins like that, ... That's a tough loss.