Howard will be a free agent at the end of this season. I ask him if he knows now where he will be playing next year, and he says, "I know."
I suggest that means the Lakers because he could not know of any other opportunity at this time. But I still make a pitch for the Clippers, figuring he might want to play for the best team in town.
He laughs, and when I suggest that some opine that if this season falls apart it will persuade him to leave, he says that's not the case.
He says the Lakers are all about championships, and "what's not to like about L.A.?"
There is an expectation by some that he cannot coexist with Kobe.
"Why can't we coexist?" he asks. "Because we're opposites? I thought opposites attract.
"You know why we can play well together? Kobe knows how hard I work and that I'm all about championships. We're also entertainers, and for the two hours and 20 minutes that people come to a game they want to be entertained."
So could you yell a little more at Kobe to really make it entertaining?
"We've already had our moments," he says.
As big a kid as he seems at times, trying to sing in Chinese when requested by a Chinese reporter to do so to everyone's amusement, he offers this surprise:
"I feel like I was put on this earth to change the world," he says with conviction. "I wasn't put on earth just to play basketball. I want to change the world, and this is a great platform to do it."
He talks about becoming an icon, "someone 200 years from now they will remember," and I suggest he sounds like Brad Pitt doing Achilles in "Troy."
"And he's better-looking, so he might have the edge," I add.
"I would disagree," Howard says with a grin, his charisma often as big as his appetite.
He says Lakers fans have yet to see him at his best after he underwent back surgery last spring, his friends wondering, though, if he has taken up smoking.
