David Falk remembers it minute-by-minute, just like this. He recalls coming upon a 21-year-old Juwan Howard, perfectly pleasant, sitting at a table on campus at the University of Michigan. Business attire. Business attitude. Howard smiled and welcomed Falk. Then he sorted through the neatly organized paperwork in front of him. Howard pointed to the rookie contract Falk negotiated for Alonzo Mourning, the No. 2 pick in the 1992 NBA Draft — roughly $26 million over six seasons, a little more than $4.3 million per year. Then he pointed to the contract Falk worked out for Shawn Bradley, the No. 2 pick in the 1993 NBA Draft — eight years, $44 million, or about $5.5 million per year. He looked at Falk.
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Then Howard, a 21-year-old college junior, asked David Falk, the kingmaker of modern American sports, why he didn’t get Bradley more money.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Falk says today. “He was more prepared for that meeting than almost any player I’ve ever met.”
This was the day Juwan Howard’s professional life began. He signed with Falk, the same Jedi power broker who turned Michael Jordan into the most marketable athlete on Earth and founded a firm, FAME, that has represented many of the greatest players in the NBA over the past three decades. Howard went on to play 19 years in the league alongside approximately 234 teammates, spanning generations from one born in 1962 (Otis Thorpe) to one born in 1989 (Josh Harrellson). He won 17 games in a season as a member of the 2002-03 Nuggets, and won back-to-back championships with Miami a decade later. He played for eight teams, including multiple stints with Denver and Dallas, and 18 head coaches, sometimes as many as three in one season. Jim Lynam, Bernie Bickerstaff, Don Nelson, Doc Rivers, Jeff Van Gundy, George Karl, Larry Brown, Erik Spoelstra. On and on. He suited up for all of ’em. His 1,208 games played rank 38th in NBA history.
With Howard now entering his first year as the coach of Michigan, his biography is easily packaged: Fab Five to the NBA and back again. His return to Ann Arbor comes with an underlying sense of familiarity. At his introductory news conference in May, the 46-year-old brushed away tears and told the crowd “my heart is with Michigan and will always be that way.” It was as if the last quarter century vanished. As if he never left.
Despite that craving for nostalgia, though, when it comes to who Howard is and how he’ll coach, his professional career serves as the real prelude. It seems to go overlooked that he’s one of only 20 people to play 19 years in the league.
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Perhaps that time is worth exploring. Perhaps it’s worth understanding.
To figure out Juwan Howard the coach, first consider Juwan Howard the player. As Jim Lynam, his first NBA coach puts it, the man’s career was “a fascinating tale of life experience.”
The Washington Bullets held the No. 5 pick in the 1994 NBA Draft and liked their choices. According to then-GM John Nash, the top-five names on their board were Glenn Robinson, Jason Kidd, Grant Hill, Donyell Marshall and Juwan Howard. The Bullets were prepared to select whichever of the five fell to them. All this time later, Nash says he thought there was a chance he could snag Hill at No. 5, “but we were taking whoever was there,” Nash says.
The top four went, in order: Robinson (Milwaukee), Kidd (Dallas), Hill (Detroit), Marshall (Minnesota).
The Bullets selected Howard, placing him as the centerpiece of a team coming off a 24-58 season. In 1993-94, their leading scorers were Rex Chapman, Don MacLean and Tom Gugliotta. Howard, coming off the Fab Five phenomena, was immediately the biggest name, along with second-year guard Calbert Cheaney. Management loved Howard, but inside the locker room, no one was quite sure what to expect.
Then he showed up.
“The guy walks in wearing a suit, shakes everyone’s hand, looks everyone in the eye,” Chapman remembers. “It was like he was 40 years old. He was more mature than I was. He was more mature than most of us were.”
Though Falk had gone to war over a few rookie contracts in the preceding years, when it came to Howard, he presented the Bullets with what he calls today “the most vanilla deal I’ve ever done.” Falk proposed a six-year, $24.2 million contract, an offer equalling the exact average of the contracts signed by the No. 4 and No. 6 picks.
Abe Pollin was having none of this. A construction magnate from the 1950s, ’60s and beyond, Pollin was the longest-tenured owner in the NBA and had reached his breaking point when it came to the rapidly escalating rookie contracts. This was the era before the rookie salary scale and owners were annually paying larger and larger contracts for more and more unproven players.
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Pollin was of the impression that he needed to reject Falk’s deal out of principle. So he did. Then he stepped into the negotiations between Nash and Falk, and presented Howard with a paltry three-year, $3 million per year deal. “Which was absurd,” Falk says, “because the year before they gave Calbert Cheaney $3 million per for six years as the No. 6 pick. The offer was too small and too short, and just made no sense.”
Falk was incensed. Howard was insulted. He later told Sports Illustrated: “It was not about how much money. It was about what was fair. It was about getting the respect you truly deserve.”
Howard rejected the contract. Negotiations deteriorated. The ordeal dragged on through training camp and into the season. Howard held out for the first seven games of 1994-95, leaving the front office facing the wrath of fans and media. Pollin, who died in 2009, had made a brutal miscalculation. The early handling of Howard’s contract backfired dramatically, giving Falk all the leverage. Finally, Pollin and Nash had few choices but to sign Howard to whatever deal they could get. The rookie signed a 12-year, $43 million contract that, to the dismay of Nash, included a player option to terminate the contract after two years. Falk knew significant changes to the NBA’s salary structure were coming in 1996 and wanted all of his clients to hold chips during that offseason. Thus, Howard’s contract included an out-clause that no other top-five draftee in his rookie class received.
“I was strongly against it, but it happened,” Nash says today.
With that, Howard was finally an NBA player. He came off the bench for the first 11 games of his career, then stepped into the starting role on Dec. 17, 1994, replacing Kevin Duckworth. Howard averaged 18.7 points and 8.6 rebounds over the next 54 games of his rookie season.
The same November day Juwan Howard signed his long-awaited deal, the Bullets completed a sign-and-trade for Chris Webber and, for a moment, Washington was a technicolor fantasyland straight from David Stern’s dreamscape. A Fab Five redux? In the nation’s capital? This was reality TV in a time when the world was just being introduced to reality TV. The Bullets dealt Gugliotta and three first-round picks to Golden State to land Webber, the disgruntled star, but no one cared about the details. Webber signed a six-year, $57 million deal with Washington.
“Getting those two back together, oh, it was a huge deal,” Nash says.
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For all the buildup, though, it never quite worked. The Bullets finished 21-61 in Howard’s rookie season. They started 9-6 the next year, but a shoulder injury sidelined Webber for the remainder of the season. That left Howard as the face of the franchise and, in a twist of history’s ties, chartered the course for his future. Playing without Webber for only a second year since high school, Howard averaged 22.1 points and 8.1 rebounds and was named an NBA All-Star — what would be the lone All-Star appearance of his career.
“There was so much more to his game than the numbers,” Lynam says. “He wasn’t the flashy-type of player and he was a good athlete, but not a super athlete. What he was, was fundamentally sound. He was very, very skilled at what he did.”
This was all, of course, just in time for Falk’s plan to take shape. It was no secret that Howard held the two-year opt-out clause in his contract. Back when he signed his contentious rookie deal, Falk called him the same day and told him: “Look, I want you to understand something, I have a very long memory, and I’m going to make you the first $100 million guy in sports to send a statement that you don’t treat people this way.” Howard paused, then laughed, and responded: “David, I love your passion, but you surely must be on crack.”
Falk was not, in fact, on crack.
In the days leading up to the start of free-agency negotiations on July 9, 1996, the Bullets held a parade down the street of Falk’s Washington, D.C., office with signs reading, “We Love You Juwan,” and ran an ad in The Washington Post asking fans to donate to Howard’s charity foundation. Falk had a slew of clients entering contract negotiations — Howard, Mourning, Chapman, Dikembe Mutombo, Kenny Anderson and Armen Gilliam, among others — and set up his office as a headquarters for teams to visit.
When the time arrived, coach Pat Riley walked in the door and offered $105 million over seven years for Howard to join the Miami Heat. At the time, no athlete from any of North America’s four major professional leagues had ever inked a nine-figure deal. Howard could become the first.
The offer was in line with expectations. Falk made sure of it. Though he usually didn’t discuss specific figures with the media before negotiations with teams, he made an exception in Howard’s case, in part because “I was still outraged at the way (Washington) treated him the first time.” So Falk called Post reporter Richard Justice to tell him it was going to take $15 million to $20 million per year for Howard to re-sign with the Bullets. He then called Wes Unseld, who had replaced Nash as general manager, and told him, “Wes, we can’t talk till Tuesday, but when you wake up tomorrow, make sure you read The Washington Post.”
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Nevertheless, when Tuesday arrived Unseld showed up at Falk’s office with an offer of $11.2 million per year. Falk told Unseld that Washington was out of the running. On Friday, Pollin invited Falk and Howard to a meeting at his home. The two sat in the same seats they had sat in for negotiations two years earlier. Pollin looked at them both and said: “We’re going to make one last offer. Non-negotiable.”
That offer: $12 million per year.
“Juwan couldn’t believe it,” Falk says. “He wanted to stay in D.C. He made a home there. Set up a charity there. He loved it. He was in tears that night. ‘Why is this happening again?’ ”
Riley waited that night in a Washington hotel near Falk’s office. By Saturday morning, he had his man. Howard was going to sign for $105 million.
“A contract that shook the structure,” Lynam says. “It was a quantum leap forward.” The Heat scheduled a news conference for July 17 and sent a private plane to D.C. to scoop Howard. When asked why he signed with Miami, Howard pointed at Riley and said, “This guy here has won five championships, right?”
“Six,” Riley interrupted.
All was well in Howard’s world. The Heat added free agents Tim Hardaway and P.J. Brown, and re-signed Mourning, making him the second $100 million player in the league with an identical seven-year, $105 million deal.
This was all nothing more than an alternate universe, though. Howard’s deal fell to pieces. At this time, Riley, one of the most powerful figures in the game, wasn’t on great with terms with NBA commissioner David Stern. Falk, meanwhile, had essentially become a third branch of government within the NBA. Plenty of owners out there saw him as a too-powerful snake charmer. Theories abound whether the issues with Howard’s contract were conjured to send a message to one, or the other, or both, but either way, the league voided the contract. Claims were levied that the Heat violated salary cap rules by agreeing to a deal with Mourning and failing to count bonuses in the contracts of Hardaway and Brown. (Riley declined to speak for this story.)
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The ordeal devolved rapidly, ending up in front of arbitrators, and Howard was declared a free agent all over again. Because free agency was so far along, few teams had cap space to give Howard anything resembling his value. That is, except for Washington. Even though the Bullets signed Rod Strickland, Tracey Murray and Chris Whitney as free agents in the wake of Howard’s departure, and landed Harvey Grant in a trade, the league office granted the franchise a waiver to sign Howard and not have his salary count against the cap.
Both Howard and Washington needed to act quickly. The Bullets, dealt an unprecedented do-over, offered a seven-year, $105-million deal to match Miami. Howard signed, even though, technically, Miami still believed it held his rights. The fiasco ended up with the Dade County Circuit Court granting a temporary injunction against him to sign with another team.
In the end, through some dense clouds, Howard emerged as a member of the Washington Bullets.
The damage, however, was more than done. A narrative was cemented in Washington: Howard was greedy, he tried to ditch the franchise, he was overpaid. It didn’t help when he was charged with a DWI as a 23-year-old in 1996, pleaded not guilty, and agreed to enter an alcohol rehabilitation and education program not long after landing his mega-deal. Howard went on to spend the next four years marooned on an island. He was seen as a constant reminder of misappropriated funds and the embodiment of a fledgling, irrelevant franchise. In 1997, Washington rebranded from the Bullets to the Wizards, but couldn’t change its identity as a team that couldn’t finish above fourth in the Atlantic Division. By 1998 and ’99, and into the 2000s, the franchise plummeted back to the depths of the division. It rattled through coaches like middle relievers. Jim Lynam to Bernie Bickerstaff to Jim Brovelli to Gar Heard to Darrell Walker to Leonard Hamilton. By 2000-01, the Wizards were a 19-63 team and Howard, being paid nearly $17 million, was booed mercilessly on a near nightly basis.
No one particularly cared that Howard played 410 of a possible 460 games over his six years in Washington, averaging 18.4 points and 7.5 rebounds per game.
“He was the picture of consistency, but it was never good enough,” Cheaney says.
“He went out, put up 20 and 10,” says Tim Hardaway, who signed with Miami in ’96, in part, because he thought he was going to play with Howard. “What else do you want him to do? It’s up to the GM to put guys around you. The thing about Juwan, though, he never said nothing about that. He went out every night, put up 20 and 10, and did what he was supposed to do — gave his team a chance to win.”
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In Miami, meanwhile, from 1996-97 through 2000-01, the Heat won four Atlantic Division championships, made the playoffs all five seasons and reached the 1997 Eastern Conference finals and the 2000 conference semifinals.
“With Juwan, though?” Hardaway says. “We would’ve been a monster team.”
Howard was traded from Washington to Dallas midway through the 2000-01 season in an eight-player deal. The next year, at the trading deadline, he was acquired by the Denver Nuggets in a seven-player trade that included a first-round pick. In those two seasons, Howard earned the final $38 million due to him from the $105 million contract in Washington.
Two decades after the fact, there’s no more startling revelation than this: Because of the opt-out in his rookie contract in Washington — an option never given to the likes of Robinson or Hill or Kidd or Marshall — Howard earned nearly double what his fellow top-five picks from the 1996 draft made over the first nine years of their careers. Howard pulled in nearly $109 million. The next closest was Hill, with $64 million. Marshall, the player selected directly ahead of Howard, made a modest $38 million.
But this ain’t about the money.
The fact is, Juwan Howard was never a franchise player. He was not the star to construct a roster around. He was highly skilled, highly motivated, but marginally athletic (by NBA standards) and rarely dominant. As Lynam puts it: “Riley had the right sense for who he was. Juwan wasn’t a guy who was going to score 30, 35 points per game. He was really a foundational piece on which to build, to build a really successful franchise for the long-term.”
What Howard was, more than anything, was a professional.
Pro·fes·sion·al.
“You know, we all think that we change as we get older — but I’m not sure he has,” Chapman says. “He’s the same guy now when I met him at 20. I mean, I know experiences shaped him and stuff, but he was just a dude who was perfectly wired to be a basketball lifer. A lot of guys are in the league to make money. He was there to handle his business. He was a pro.”
Howard signed with Orlando as a free agent in the summer of 2003 when general manager John Gabriel, a disciple of John Nash, called him in the first hour of the free-agency period. He gave Howard a six-year, $37 million deal, bringing Howard aboard as a No. 2 scorer to Tracy McGrady.
At his introductory news conference, Howard told reporters: “It’s a fresh start. I know in the past that my contract has overshadowed my game and my career. But if you look at my numbers statistically, numbers don’t lie.”
The fresh start lasted exactly one game. Orlando opened the year with an overtime win against the Knicks, then promptly lost its next 10 games. Management fired coach Doc Rivers and replaced him with Johnny Davis, who lost the next nine. The Magic finished 21-61 and McGrady demanded an offseason trade. The deal went down on June 29, 2004. In a blockbuster deal built to propel the Houston Rockets to among the top teams in the league, McGrady and Howard, along with Tyronn Lue and Reece Gaines, were dealt to Houston. They joined a roster that already included Yao Ming and Jim Jackson. Houston improved, but never climbed into the conversation of top Western Conference contenders. Howard averaged 10.4 points and 6.1 rebounds.
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For more than a decade, Howard was a constant. One of the most respected players in the league. Ex-teammates describe him the way you imagine the Rolling Stones describe Charlie Watts — in control of the noise, but at the same time hip, thinking on another level, and ethereally cool. He was 6-foot-9 but didn’t take over a room. He spoke to men the way men wanted to be spoken to. And when he stepped on the floor? Well, damn, you best look out.
Hardaway played with and against him for parts of eight years. He makes Howard sound like Omar Little in shorts.
“When guys went against Juwan, it was like, Ah shit, I better put on my hardhat. Juwan’s coming,” Hardaway says. “He’d bring it, man. He didn’t play. He was a professional. He had heart, he was confident, and he didn’t give two craps who you were. You better be ready and you better have your shit together.”
At the end of his time in Houston, Howard was 34 and dealing with an inconvenient truth. The end was coming. Stubborn and proud, he didn’t much back off, outworking the mortals who weren’t willing to be the first one in the gym or the last one to leave. He hung around the league, making a series of terse, disconnected stops, sorting through various personas. To Dallas for the 2007-08 season, averaging 7.1 minutes per game. Stops in Denver and Charlotte in 2008-09.
It looked like Howard had shed his last skin when, entering 2009-10, Portland called. Nate McMillan needed a reliable, veteran to add depth and mentor young bigs LaMarcus Aldridge and Greg Oden. Until then, Howard thought his post-playing future would be in an NBA front office. Watching McMillan operate, though, Howard reimagined himself. He went from a veteran trying to crack the rotation to a quasi player-coach role, evolving into a translator between his teammates and the coaches, and a mediator between the coaches and his teammates.
“And he wasn’t told to do that,” McMillan says. “That was just Juwan. It’s his ability to communicate with people. Coaching is in him. Teaching is in him. It just came really naturally. He took that role on because that’s who he is.”
More than any other player, Oden needed a seasoned perspective. The No. 1 pick in the 2007 NBA Draft, he missed all of his first season with a knee injury and mostly underwhelmed as a rookie in 2008-09. When 2009-10 arrived, he was only 22 and already at a crossroads. Howard, 36, talked him through dealing with media, the mounting pressure of living up to hype and the demands of the job. Today, Oden is 31, his career cut short by a body that betrayed him, and entering the coaching ranks himself. Howard remains his model for how to teach, how to talk. He looks back on Howard as “one of the best teammates I ever had.”
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“Guys kind of want to be the man no matter where they are in their career, but Juwan was so selfless with that team, regardless of whether he was going to play that night,” Oden says. “Literally everyone on that team had their own individual relationship with him.”
It was all preparation for a proper prologue.
On July 21, 2010, down the far right column on the sports front of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, a sidebar ran with the nondescript headline “Howard brings muscle to lineup.” The Miami Heat, nearly 14 years to the day after first trying to sign Howard, landed the 37-year-old in an attempt to add some depth.
There was no news conference. “We feel that Juwan’s ability to play both the 4 and the 5 spot will be complementary to what we have put together,” Riley said in a team statement.
What Riley had put together was a thunderclap still rippling across the league. Miami began the 2010 offseason by re-signing Dwyane Wade, then adding free agent LeBron James and acquiring Chris Bosh. The Heat filled out the roster with role players and veterans. Over the course of 2010-11, eight players with at least 10 years of NBA experience held a roster spot at one point or another.
There was only one Juwan Howard, though.
“I remember when we missed on him the first time, (Heat owner Micky Arison) said, ‘If we ever get a chance to get him again, let’s do it,'” says coach Erik Spoelstra. “So we did.”
Howard was the star whisperer in Miami. Whereas he was a conduit between players and coaches in previous stops such as Portland, with the Heat he served as arbiter and intermediary. He wasn’t the ringleader but was instead the central pole holding up the big top. The combination of personalities and VIPs within the locker room was flammable — in all ways. Spoelstra, a 39-year-old in his third year as an NBA coach, was charged with making it all work. It was a task requiring the counsel of someone who’d been everywhere, seen everything.
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“He was able to come in and roll up his sleeves and get everyone, from player to player, on the same page,” Spoelstra says. “He got them to look at things in different ways when emotions were high. He was the guy. And it all came from him wanting what was best for that team and wanting to win a title.”
The Heat won 58 regular-season games and reached the 2011 NBA Finals that first year, losing in six games to the Mavericks. The next year, after re-signing Howard to another one-year deal, all those roads out of Washington and Denver and Dallas and Orlando and Houston finally came together. The natural default settings that guided Howard through 19 years in the NBA made him the perfect player-coach for a team looking for its own self-actualization.
On May 24, 2012, the Heat trailed Indiana at halftime of Game 6 of the Eastern Conference semifinals. It was supposed to be the night Miami wrapped up the series, advanced to the conference finals and continued its march to a title. Instead, a flat-ass effort gave life to the Pacers and inserted a chance the series reached Game 7.
Spoelstra was furious. Walking down the tunnel into the locker room at halftime, he prepared to call his players out and “light them up.” We’ll never know what he would’ve said, though, because Howard was already burning the building down. A baritone voice echoed down the hallway before Spoelstra arrived at the door. Howard, now 38, stood in front of a locker room of stars — wide-eyed, lantern-jawed, molten-hot — and told every man in the room what they needed to hear, leaving only a blast radius behind. He threw a water bottle against the wall.
“So real, so authentic, all from the heart,” Spoelstra says.
The Heat outscored the Pacers, 28-16, in the third quarter, and won, 105-93. They advanced past the Celtics next, winning the conference finals in seven games, and reached the finals against Oklahoma City.
A week and a half later, on June 21, 2012, with Juwan Howard on the floor for the closing three minutes of regulation, the Heat finished the series in five games. It was his only playing time of the series. “I wanted him to be able to enjoy it,” Spoelstra says. “He had his fingerprints all over that team, all over the success.” You’d have hardly known he was out there. The cameras focused on James, Wade and Bosh sharing hugs with Oklahoma City stars Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden. Howard stood at center court, looking up, as the confetti fell.
He made $1,352,181 for the season. The veteran league minimum.
In the march of time, the defining characteristic of Juwan Howard is his seeming inability to age. In Miami, he signed two 10-day contracts late in 2012-13, his final season on record. The Heat were utterly dominant, on their way to a 66-win campaign, but there was a tangible void in the locker room. “We were missing that voice, that presence,” Spoelstra says. “So we were like, all right, let’s bring Juwan back in the mix.” Miami won a second straight title with Howard on the bench in a suit, transitioning from player to coach in front of everyone’s eyes.
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Spoelstra and members of the Heat front office spent the next year recruiting Howard to be a coach. He was apprehensive and transitioned slowly, working first in a player development role in 2013-14. The Heat knew other franchises were lining up to hire him as an assistant and spent the season persuading him to accept an assistant coaching position. He accepted the offer the next season.
“That hire was a no-brainer of all no-brainers,” Spoelstra says. “Juwan is hardwired for mentorship.”
All along, though, Howard looked exactly the same. The old man with the clipboard in Miami bore an uncanny resemblance to the rookie in Washington.
Both look an awful lot like the first-year head coach at Michigan.
The player. The pro.
(Top photo of Howard in October 1996: Sporting News via Getty Images)
