Russell Westbrook had some choice words for his former team as he returned to the Denver Nuggets’ locker room following his Game 7 victory on Saturday. “Picked the wrong person, didn’t they?” he reportedly asked, rhetorically, upon eliminating the Los Angeles Clippers.
Though one answer seems likeliest, it’s not fully clear to whom he is referring. The obvious answer is James Harden, with whom Westbrook played on three separate teams. The Clippers traded for him last season, and he supplanted Westbrook as the team’s starting point guard. Harden scored just seven points in Game 7.
Westbrook also could have been referring to Kris Dunn, whom the Clippers traded Westbrook for last summer. The Nuggets frequently played help defense off of Dunn because they didn’t fear his 3-point shooting.
Perhaps he was referring to coach Ty Lue, as the Clippers frequently picked Westbrook as the Nugget they wouldn’t guard from deep. Westbrook punished them by shooting 42% from 3-point range in the series.
It ultimately doesn’t matter, because the truth of the last several years is that Westbrook would have understandable gripes with far more than three people. The second half of his Hall of Fame career has been, by basically any measure, a mess.
When he reunited with Harden in Houston, it went so poorly offensively that the Rockets had to abandon the center position entirely to try to make it work. He got swept out of the first round in Washington as a No. 8 seed. The Lakers are only now recovering from their disastrous decision to trade for him in 2022. The Clippers, well, Westbrook said it himself, now didn’t he?
Westbrook is an MVP, the first player since Oscar Robertson to average a triple-double, and had he retired at 30, that’s all he would have been remembered for. But legacies for non-champions tend be cruel. Harden, an MVP in his own right, will surely be reminded of that in the wake of his awful Game 7.
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Brad Botkin
Westbrook’s struggles to adapt to a new team have defined his entire post-Thunder career, and until recently, seemed destined to taint an otherwise historic legacy. If Harden’s career could be distilled so cruelly into a handful of horrible elimination games, what hope did Westbrook have of escaping the very ugly, very messy ending of his career?
Probably not much, especially since he held his fair share of blame for it. He spent years pushing back against necessary changes to his game. He could always summon great defense for big plays or in the right matchups, but his effort on a possession-by-possession basis left something to be desired. He’s always turned the ball over too much and taken too many mid-range jumpers. He didn’t embrace the corner 3 until he became a Clipper, and he didn’t start making it consistently until this season.
In fact, it would be easy to ascribe Westbrook’s success as a Nugget to that specific shot. He made seven big ones in the Clipper series, including the one that sent Game 1 to overtime. He led the Nuggets by hitting 45 of them this season. That’s nearly double his total in any season he’d had since leaving the Thunder (his previous high in that span was 23), and that goes a long way towards describing his failure with those other teams. Once Westbrook left the Thunder, he had to play off of the ball more. He never got comfortable with that as a shooter or as basically anything else.
Until he arrived in Denver.
Whether the adjustments he made were due to the brilliance of Nikola Jokić, pressure accumulated from years of disappointment elsewhere, or just good old-fashioned growth, Westbrook made the subtle tweaks needed to thrive as a role player. He scored 126 points as a cutter this season, the first time he’d crossed triple-digits since 2012 despite playing the second-fewest minutes of his career in a non-injury, pandemic- or lockout-shortened season. He posted the second-highest offensive rebounding rate of his post-Thunder career. Finally, he started to become the off-ball player his teams needed him to be.
Some of these changes started with the Clippers. That’s when he began offensive rebounding again, and when he turned a bunch of his bad mid-range jumpers into corner 3s. But part of what made the Denver partnership work was that the Nuggets never tried to bury Westbrook’s old self — they just tried to get him to embrace new things as well. The Clippers could never really empower Westbrook to play his typical, chaotic brand of basketball on a team with Harden and Kawhi Leonard pounding the rock, soaking up possession and clock.
But the Nuggets badly needed an injection of chaos. Their bench has been a mess throughout the Jokić era in part because no backup can replicate his unique playing style. Westbrook obviously doesn’t, but he sidesteps the need to by bringing his own identity to the floor. Yes, that often means turnovers and sloppy offense, but the Nuggets deftly realized that they were losing games on the bench anyway. Westbrook might lose them some, but the high-variance way in which he plays would win them just as many.
He even acknowledged that himself after Game 7.
“I think it’s my ability to be a force of nature on the floor, so whatever that looks like. It may be a turnover, it may be a missed shot, it may be a steal, it may be a dunk, it may be a missed three, it may be a made three,” he said. “It could be all of that, so just take it how it comes, and whatever happens, you go with it.”
That energy, even if it could take the Nuggets down bad paths as easily as it could good ones, has become a genuine asset for Denver.
And Jokić learned to embrace it on his better nights. When bad Westbrook proved problematic, the Nuggets simply took him out. When the good version of him was humming, the Nuggets leaned in. They let him run his two-man game with Jokić in critical moments and remain more involved in the game than he ever could next to Harden or LeBron James. Maybe it took the NBA’s most inclusive teammate, but Denver finally found the right balance between the player Westbrook had always been and the one everyone wanted him to become.
That’s why they’re advancing right now. Westbrook had his share of shaky moments throughout the series, but the good outweighed the bad. The Nuggets would not have beaten the Clippers without him.
If you need proof of that, look no further than another one of his ex-teams, the Lakers, who just lost a playoff series in which JJ Redick used the same five-man lineup for the entire second half of one game. Denver has spent the past several years coming close to doing the same. You can’t win in the postseason with five players. Westbrook gave them a sixth, and he gave it to them for almost nothing.
That’s a key distinction here. Westbrook’s foibles were untenable on a max contract. The rewards outweigh the risks for a minimum, and he’s probably never making more than that again. He’s at a different stage of his career now, at age 36 and firmly a reserve. He’s seen how badly things can go on the the wrong team. Why ever leave the right one?
Hopefully he doesn’t. Westbrook’s series and season with the Nuggets should round out the story of this portion of his career. He’ll never quite untangle the bad moments from the good ones, but before he became a Nugget, there just hadn’t been nearly enough good ones to preserve his post-prime reputation.
Had his career ended a year or two ago, the enduring memory of an all-time great would have been how sadly it all ended. He’s surely well aware of it. He’s heard the “West-brick” chants. He certainly knows what the Clippers thought of him because he said as much after the game. Right or wrong, their feelings matched the greater consensus.
This Nuggets stint is therefore serving as an important reminder of what he can be when things go right. He’s mercurial, he’s inconsistent and he has meaningful weaknesses, but he was always far more than these last few years suggested.
In Denver, he’s had a chance to remind the basketball world of that, and in this series, he ran with it.