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Mike D’Antoni vs. Dwight Howard is just one facet of the underrated beef between the Lakers and Rockets

When Mike D’Antoni and Dwight Howard were first brought together, they were supposed to fix a would-be Lakers dynasty gone askew. Instead, their disastrous pairing brought the purple and gold to ruin, so it’s fitting that in the first appearance the Lakers have made in the NBA playoffs since D’Antoni was their coach, they’ll be facing him and the Houston Rockets team that Howard left them for, in the second round of the postseason that the two of them couldn’t succeed in getting Los Angeles to.

The superstar empowerment era has turned the NBA into a tangled web of connections, but the link between these two teams, D’Antoni and Howard is more full of feuds than most.