Dwight Howard was traded at the end of the season for the third straight offseason, now in his fourth different city in the past three years following breakups with the Houston Rockets, his hometown Atlanta Hawks, and most recently the Charlotte Hornets.

The new member of the Washington Wizards explained why his reputation has played a large part in these short stints while explaining he was completely blindsided by the most recent trade, as the Hornets dealt him to the Brooklyn Nets — a move he learned through social media.

“I didn’t see any signs. I wouldn’t think after having a really good season a team would be like, ‘OK, let’s trade you.’ That really caught me off-guard. That’s why I said in the press conference, the Hornets stung me,” Howard said, according to Michael Lee of Yahoo Sports. “I asked [general manager] Mitch [Kupchak] and I asked the coach: What did I do? Was it something in the locker room that I did? And Mitch said, ‘No, it had nothing to do with the locker room. It has nothing to do with you as a person. We just felt like we wanted to go in this direction as a team.’ I asked him, ‘If this is the truth, you need to come out and say this stuff, because people are thinking it’s because I did something in the locker room or acted a certain type of way.’ And I’m like, ‘This is not who I am.'”

Howard has clearly been bothered by the hearsay and is hopeful that this time around it could change. The Wizards have a wide-open path to the Eastern Conference crown and if they snatch the throne, the talk will be based on their performance, not Howard's antics or locker room etiquette — a stigma that has proven hard to shake.

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“I’m from the country and they say, ‘A lie don’t care who tell it.’ A lie will get around a lot faster than the truth, because a lot of people can’t really handle the truth,” Howard added. “A lot of people hate what they don’t understand. I can’t focus on that.”

The big man is coming off one of his best seasons in recent memory, posting 16.6 points, 12.5 rebounds, and 1.6 blocks after playing in 81 games during the 2017-18 season.