Dwight Howard was confused.

On a team led by LeBron James and Anthony Davis, Howard was seen as a key role player during the Lakers’ 2020 NBA championship season. But he was not brought back the following season.

“I was so sad. I wanted to come back,” Howard said on this week’s episode of his podcast “Above the Rim with DH12.” “And I don’t know what had happened.”

His guest, Lakers owner Jeanie Buss, was also confused by Howard’s comment.

“You accepted an offer from the Philadelphia 76ers,” Buss told him.

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During a conversation that seemed genuinely warm and caring, Howard and Buss cleared the air about the end of the second (and most successful) of Howard’s three stints with the Lakers. The eight-time All-Star indicated that his agent at the time led him to believe that the team had no interest in re-signing him as a free agent.

Howard’s former agent was Charles Briscoe, who pleaded guilty last year for his role in defrauding Howard of $7 million in a bogus scheme to buy the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream. Briscoe collaborated with Calvin Darden Jr. to commit the fraud, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, and was convicted by a federal jury in Manhattan earlier this month.

In another case, Darden was convicted of cheating former NBA forward Chandler Parsons out of $1 million.

“I think we were just told so many different things,” Howard told Buss, “and I think now I look back on it with the situation I had with my agent… So I don’t even know. which was the truth, for I was told you had no offer for me.

Buss replied: “Oh no, that’s not true. We have made an offer. We did that.”

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Howard replied: “I never even knew that. He told me – well, actually he said you guys had an offer, and then he said you guys took the offer back and said, ‘No.’

Later in the conversation, Howard checked again.

“So you all had an offer for me?” he asked.

“Yes!” Bus replied.

She explained that with the NBA’s salary cap, it can sometimes be difficult to find the right timing when making contract offers to build a roster.

“I think when a team says, we have a contract, but you have to wait to sign it, or we have to sign other players first, it seems like you’re not a priority,” Howard said. said.

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Buss responded: “I understand why you feel that way and (that’s) probably what another team trying to sign you would say to you to take us down. But that’s not who we are. And you know that.”

Both Howard and Buss agreed that the Lakers could have won additional championships if the 2020 team had stayed together. Instead, several players, including Rajon Rondo, left as free agents, while the team traded away players like Danny Green and JaVale McGee.

“Do you feel like if we had kept the team together, we would have won some championships?” Howard asked Buss.

Buss replied: “I think so. I feel like when you win a championship you give the guys a chance to defend their title. … But once there were three or four guys who didn’t come back, it wasn’t the same anymore.

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Howard ultimately signed a one-year contract with the 76ers, but returned to the Lakers for 2021-22, the last of his eighteen seasons in the NBA.

“It’s so good to have the conversation because there is now no room for miscommunication. We have an agreement,” Howard said. ‘Because I was so hurt by that for years. … It just seemed like we had something, but it’s like we weren’t pursuing it on both ends like we should have.

Buss later added: “We would have been better off if we had stayed together. But it was a misdirection or a misunderstanding.”

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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.