Without Kobe Bryant, the center has taken Lakers on his back going into the playoffs.

In the final minutes of the final night of the regular season, one of the NBA‘s freshest stars was met in front of the basket by one of the NBA’s most frustrating stars.

James Harden was on his way up. Dwight Howard was standing still. It was the perfect metaphor for two players whose careers had spent this winter careening in different directions.

Harden had joined the Houston Rockets and brought instant energy and excitement. Howard had joined the Lakers and brought mostly torpor and tepid.

Harden had become the Rockets’ future. Howard couldn’t figure out how he fit in the Lakers’ present.

They were two men on vastly different paths when, with 2:11 left in the Staples Center paint in overtime of the Lakers’ battle with the Rockets on Wednesday night, those paths collided.

Time to draw a new map.

Harden, headed for layup that would give the Rockets the lead, went up, up, up … and down.

Howard grabbed the ball out of Harden’s hands and pulled it to his chest and flung the bearded wonder into a heap on the baseline, leaving him writhing on the Lakers’ insignia.

It was a blocked shot. It was a steal. It was a mugging. It was magnificent.

For many Lakers fans who have waited seven months for Howard to finally show up, it was more than a play, it was a statement of relief and awe.

So that is what Superman looks like.

It’s been only two full games since Kobe Bryant shuffled off the floor with a torn Achilles’ tendon Friday night, and now Dwight Howard is a player transformed.

He’s been playing with an aggressive freedom rarely seen during those long winter nights of moping through Memphis. He’s been playing with a resilient swagger that had somehow become lost in all the courtside clowning.

He acts as if he’s just shed a straitjacket of doubt, his movements filled with a relentless intensity, his game teeming with joy.

He acts like — with Bryant suddenly gone and the franchise’s future suddenly here — the Lakers are his team. At this rate, who knows, maybe they will be.

“This is the Dwight we thought we’d see,” teammate Steve Blake said.

This is the Howard who led the confused and depleted Lakers against San Antonio and Houston by sheer force of his defensive will. He has long been the league’s best rebounder, but this was about much more. This was about the Lakers shooting 37% in consecutive games while missing a combined 40 three-point attempts and yet winning both games because Howard’s defense wouldn’t let them lose.

This is the Howard who, in the final minutes of regulation against the Rockets, typified his resurgence with one memorable sequence. First, Howard jumped in Harden’s face to stop a layup attempt, forcing a pass. Then, after missing his own layup at the other end, Howard raced downcourt and knocked the ball off Jeremy Lin‘s leg under the basket. It was just a simple steal that will never make a highlight reel, but it caused Howard to spin away and ball up his fists and scream to the sky while a rowdy Staples Center crowd screamed with him.

The Lakers are not a better team without Bryant, but Howard is clearly a more empowered player. It doesn’t seem likely he can lead them to more than a stolen victory or two in their first-round playoff series against the Spurs, but now it seems obvious that he will be healthy and hearty enough to lead them into the future after his inevitable re-signing here this summer.

Like his prodigal team, he’s showing up late, but just in time to party.

“This whole season has been a great learning experience for me,” Howard said late Wednesday night after the Lakers’ 99-95 overtime victory over the Rockets. “It’s been a humbling experience, but also a learning experience. I had to learn from my mistakes, learn from watching guys like Kobe and Pau [Gasol], dealing with the L.A. media, it’s a lot different.”

He understands now that injuries — he was recovering from back surgery when the season started and says he is still not fully healed — are no excuse for intensity.

“It was a tough process, I kept fighting. I kept coming in and working my butt off,” he said.

He understands now that every loss is a big Lakers deal, as he still smiles and jokes in the locker room, but no longer grins at a missed free throw or turnover.

“It has been maturing me, making me a better leader for this team,” he said of his season.

He was the only Laker to speak to the team before its first practice after Bryant’s injury. He has since been the loudest Laker speaking in the huddles and after the games. Everyone knew he had a laugh, who knew he also had a voice?

“They are all looking at me,” he said.

Everyone was still looking at him long after Wednesday’s victory when he met Gasol in the Staples Center hallway outside the Lakers’ locker room. They unabashedly hugged and walked to their cars together as if leaving a high school gym. Howard led. Gasol followed. It was a nice ending. It was a sweet beginning.

On Wednesday night, Dwight Howard became the youngest player in NBA history to collect 9,000 rebounds.

Just 16 seconds into the Lakers battle against the Houston Rockets, Howard collected his own miss to hit the milestone.

Howard hit 9,000 at 27 years and 130 days old. Wilt Chamberlain accomplished the same feat at the age of 27 and 144 days. Bill Russell did it in 27 years 357 days.

Heading into the game Wednesday, Howard had 927 rebounds on the season at 12.4 a game.

Howard is in his ninth season after spending his first eight in Orlando with the Magic.

His career high on the glass was during the 2011-12 season, when he averaged 14.5 rebounds a game.

Los Angeles Lakers center Dwight Howard has been a lightning rod for controversy throughout the 2012-13 NBA season, and the latest release of his signature shoe by Adidas is certain to keep people talking.

As part of a large rollout of releases surrounding this weekend’s All-Star festivities in Houston, Adidas unveiled the colorways their players will be wearing in Sunday’s game (via Pro Basketball Talk). Among those players are Howard, Sixers guard Jrue Holiday and Spurs forward-center Tim Duncan.

Though both Duncan and Holiday have noteworthy releases in their own right, Howard’s is the one that truly stands out in the crowd. Adorned with a red camouflage colorway, the Lakers star’s signature shoe, the D Howard Lights, will get the “sneakerhead” community going over the weekend.

Is the design risk a triumph, or does it fall flat on its face? Let’s find out. Here is a complete breakdown of the D Howard Light All-Star edition for 2013.

No matter what your ultimate judgement of these kicks is, the designers at Adidas have to be commended for taking a massive design risk here. While that’s to be expected and par for the course during this round of All-Star releases, the D Howard Lights take two massive design risks for the price of one.

Any conversation about these kicks will likely start with the decision to go with a university red colorway. It evokes memories of a gaudy time in the shoe world, where Dada sneakers had a short-lived reign as an in-vogue kicks brand.

The red make sense as a matching color to the Western Conference’s All-Star uniforms, but that’s obviously not the way these kicks were meant to be judged. Holiday and Duncan will both be rocking green kicks, a far cry from the East’s royal blue look.

Nonetheless, the bright red colorway will certainly make the shoes an instant conversation starter on the court, not unlike their namesake.

The use of camouflage is going to cause the most controversy in the “sneakerhead” community, where the pattern has been a source of derision for years. There are some, like yours truly, who like it in small doses and on special occasions. Others find it tacky and think it should be kept in the woods with the deer hunters.

That means not everyone will love these kicks, but they will be noticed by one and all. Based on that, it’s impossible to give the D Howard Lights anything except a top-notch grade in this category.

Dwight Howard may not inspire warm and fuzzy feelings from Orlando Magic fans, but the charities he helped over his eight-year stay in Central Florida continue to sing his praises. They say he has not abandoned them.

For his part, Howard recently told Ben Bolch of the Los Angeles Times that “I’m going to continue to still help out, continue to do whatever I can from afar to build that city [Orlando] up… It won’t stop because I’m on a new team in a new city.”

Which is pretty much the same thing the big man said before he headed west. And now there’s confirmation that he’s keeping his word.

Tina Ashe of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Florida — one of Howard’s favorite causes — said the NBA star has continued to give even after donning a Lakers uniform. Late last year, months after heading west, Howard wrote a $25,000 check to the charity, which was able to double the funds through a matching-grant challenge from Winter Park’s Edyth Bush Charitable Foundation.

Howard also made a recent $20,000 donation to the BETA Center, which provides residential and educational programs for pregnant teens and teen moms — another of D-12’s preferred charities. He also directed his legal team to help one of the moms sort through an immigration issue so she could stay here with her two daughters, both of whom are U.S. citizens.

BETA still makes good use of the SUV Howard donated, and its young moms still wear the winter coats Howard’s nonprofit foundation gave them. Too, the campus still has a Dwight Howard Learning Center, so named after one of his earlier donations.

BETA won’t be changing it anytime soon.

Apparently, Bolch writes, the star hasn’t forged any “formal relationships” with L.A. charitable organizations yet. But he has helped behind the scenes, which is the way he prefers it.

“It’s not about me doing it for recognition,” he told the Times. “I’m doing it because it’s something I love doing.”