At last, a Hall of Fame player the Orlando Magic can claim as its own.
Earlier this weekend, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame announced its 2025 Hall of Fame class, enshrining two male players, three female players, one referee, one head coach, one team executive and one Olympic team. Longtime Magic center Dwight Howard leads the charge, a first-ballot inductee who established himself as the best defender of his generation and arguably the best player in Orlando Magic history.
For a retired player, Howard has had an exciting past month. On March 24, the Magic inducted Howard into their franchise Hall of Fame. Now, he’s made it to Springfield with the ultimate honor. Orlando deserves to celebrate this moment as well — Howard’s induction is not only the personal validation of an elite player, but a monumental and legitimizing achievement for the franchise and its fanbase.
Of course, Dwight Howard follows in an accomplished lineage of Hall of Fame players who have made stops in the Magic Kingdom, but he’s the only one who is first and foremost a Magic superstar. Center Shaquille O’Neal led Orlando to its first NBA Finals appearance in 1994, but his best work came in the Los Angeles Lakers’ three-peat in the early 2000’s. Inductees Tracy McGrady and Vince Carter played pivotal roles on contending Magic teams, but each is better known for their stints elsewhere (McGrady had his two best seasons in Orlando but played for longer in Houston, while Carter played for less than two seasons with the Magic). Grant Hill played for Orlando from 2000 to 2007 but struggled with injuries and never made an All-NBA team with the Magic.
Howard’s Hall of Fame case is all about his time in Orlando. The Magic selected Howard out of high school with the top pick in the 2004 NBA Draft and ascended as Howard came of age in the NBA. Across Howard’s eight seasons in Orlando, Howard ranked in the top five of MVP voting in four seasons, won Defensive Player of the Year in three consecutive seasons and was named to six consecutive All-Star teams. Sure, Howard played another 10 years in the NBA for the Lakers, Rockets, Hawks, Hornets, Wizards and 76ers and won a title with the Lakers, but he never eclipsed 20 points per game again and only received two more All-Star nods. In Magic franchise history, Howard ranks first in points, rebounds, blocks, minutes played, offensive win shares and defensive win shares. Take out the last 10 seasons of Howard’s career, and he is a lock as a Hall of Famer with his Magic tenure alone.
Team success was another defining characteristic of Howard’s near-decade in Orlando. The Magic have won 50 or more games seven times in their 36 seasons, and four of those seasons were with Howard at the helm. In terms of playoff performances, Howard’s Magic teams account for three of the five seasons in which Orlando won a playoff series (a very depressing statistic, but one that shows the impact and uniqueness. of the Howard era in franchise history). The Magic’s peak came in a truly magical 2008-09 season, in which Orlando shocked the reigning NBA Finals champions, the Boston Celtics, in seven games, then sent the LeBron James-led Cleveland Cavaliers home in a 4-2 series win to reach the NBA Finals. That’s the first “Big Three” in the NBA and the best player of the 21st century, knocked out in the span of a month. Howard’s Magic teams were the rare Finals contender to be led by a defense-first superstar as its clear best player — a dynamic unparalleled in today’s NBA.
Howard pummeled the NBA during his four-year peak, and he did it in the Orlando black and royal blue.
What did Howard’s dominance mean to Magic fans? He was the main reason I started following the team back in 2009, and his pinstripe blue No. 12 jersey was the second NBA uniform I added to my collection (it was not the last). His 2008 Slam Dunk Contest win, in which he dunked while donning a Superman cape, caught my attention a year before he commandeered the Magic’s shocking playoff run and turned him into an NBA superhero. The fact that he elevated his game to get Orlando past the Paul Pierce/Kevin Garnett/Ray Allen Celtics and LeBron-led Cavaliers proved he was more than just a powerful dunker and shutdown defender — he was a reliable top option in the playoffs and easily one of the top 10 players in the NBA. While Howard was surrounded by a supporting cast of sharpshooters and reliable names like Rashard Lewis, Hedo Turkoglu and Jameer Nelson, he brought the Magic to the Finals with much less talent than most other Finals entrants of his era and without a superstar running mate like the Shaquille O’Neal-Penny Hardaway battery that sent the Magic to their first Finals in the 1990s.
Part of Howard’s Orlando chapter unfortunately includes his acrimonious, self-initiated departure from the team. Howard expressed his desire for the Magic to move past head coach Stan Van Gundy, then made his own trade demands clear. The controversy around the Magic culminated in Van Gundy’s firing and the Magic’s trade of Howard to the Los Angeles Lakers, and neither team nor player was the same for the next decade (though Howard’s Finals win as a role player in Los Angeles in 2020 and the Magic’s selection of Paolo Banchero have given each side another shining moment).
This spring should gifts Howard, the Magic and their fanbase with some semblance of closure, and that sure seems to be the case throughout these celebrations. A giddy Howard proclaimed his appreciation for his first franchise in his return for the team Hall of Fame induction, as well as his regrets with how the end went down in Orlando. And for Magic fans, Howard’s arrival in the mid-2000’s ushered in one of the franchise’s most successful, surprising eras. A first-ballot Hall of Fame selection serves as the ultimate coronation for Howard as one of the best players of the 2000s. It’s an honor that extends beyond an individual celebration and thankfully includes the team that drafted him.
Perhaps Howard’s impact on the Magic isn’t complete, either. The blockbuster, four-team trade that sent Howard to the Lakers gave the Magic their franchise centerpiece for the next decade, Nikola Vucevic. When Orlando sent Vucevic to the Chicago in a roster teardown in 2021, the Magic received a haul of draft picks and veterans that included two of their best players currently, forward Franz Wagner and center Wendell Carter Jr., and paved the way for them to be awful enough in the standings to win the number one overall pick and draft All-Star Paolo Banchero.
At Howard’s press conference during the Magic Hall of Fame festivities, he addressed the current Orlando Magic squad, which is coming off a surprise playoff berth in the 2023-24 season and is headed to the play-in tournament this year. According to Jason Beede of the Orlando Sentinel, one of his comments was directed toward the franchise’s current superstar and a player who could very well follow Howard into the Hall of Fame, Paolo Banchero.
“Thank you guys for supporting me all of my beautiful years here,” Howard said, according to Beede. “Paolo, don’t leave them. Don’t leave them.”
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