I'm Thinking About Russell Westbrook Again
On April 12, 2015, Russell Westbrook had 54 points against the Indiana Pacers. 2014–15 — perhaps you’ve forgotten — was our first extended glimpse of Russell Westbrook-as-earthquake, -as-fucked-up-weather-system, -as-Hurricane Russ.
Kevin Durant played just 27 games that year. In his absence, Russ took over, but saying “Russ took over” is such an understatement it doesn’t even scratch the surface of meaning; it’s like calling the tornado that brought Dorothy to the Land of Oz “a stiff breeze.” Russ churned Earth’s liquid outer core.
The game against the Pacers in the middle of April of 2015 felt significant to me (I even wrote about it at the time) because Russ seemed to become, as it was happening, a dark vision of his own self. The object of basketball is — duh — to score more points than the other team, but it can be hard to remember that overarching goal as each individual moment accretes imperceptibly into whatever whole it is going to become. The goal, for Russ, seemed to be to be careening. To be boiling. To be an impossible force.
And he scored 54 points (!) on 43 shots (&#%!@?), and the Thunder lost by 12 to a 38–44 Indiana Pacers team. Russ was so hectic and frantic and miserable down the stretch it was hard to watch. It felt like watching some gunslinger in an old Western head back into town even though he knows he’s gonna die. The loss meant the Thunder missed the playoffs (they lost the tiebreaker to the New Orleans Pelicans).
Just to reiterate: what I’m describing here was more than seven years ago. Think about all the Russ discourse we’ve done since then! The man won an MVP award for fuck’s sake! Russ singlehandedly made us not give a shit about triple doubles anymore!
In the years since, Russ has kept being Russ in more ways than you’d think. We complain about his shooting, but his percentages aren’t really all that different; in fact, other than taking more floaters and fewer long 2s, where his shots come from on the floor hasn’t changed much either.
And yet over the years, while Russ was avoiding change, he got older, and the evidence that his style of play might not be the best way to win basketball games began to pile up. That part of it happened slowly, but other parts happened — or so it felt to me — in the blink of an eye. He signed an inevitable supermax contract, and almost within moments that contract was the most team-unfriendly contract in the NBA.
Today, Russell Westbrook has become a joke — he’s an absolute failure, falling apart at the seams on a team that’s a laughingstock. The Lakers make no sense. Russell Westbrook is a diamond traveling back in time, and eventually, if it keeps going this way, if I have my science right, he’ll just be a turd in the tundra.
I want to be clear: this makes me sad. The way Russ plays — unpliable, inflexible, intractable — is antithetical to everything I love about basketball. I love watching the ball move. I love seeing how players can amplify each other, how a team can become greater than the sum of its parts. This shit is like a religion to me.
Russ — an inevitable seismic doomsday event of a basketball player — made me love him anyway through sheer force of will. Like Allen Iverson before him, Russ’s effort was telegenic and inspirational. It’s almost impossible for me to even talk about him without resorting to metaphors culled from high school Earth Science class or Hollywood movies.
What makes me sad isn’t just about Russ’s decline though; it’s about how we talk about it. To Russ, it must feel like the rug was pulled out from under him. Qualities that once garnered praise now bring ridicule. He’s been telling us that it hurts him, and that just makes us more cruel. He won an MVP doing it his way, and now his way isn’t working. Shouldn’t we have empathy for that? Shouldn’t we, chained up in the dungeons of our own hangups and terrible tendencies, cut the guy a little slack?
We should. But my wish for Russ is that he might find it within himself to bend, to change, even in the face of all this idiotic discourse. He’s kept so much on his own shoulders as a basketball player. For so many years, his teams won or lost based on his ability to carry a superhuman load, and you could say it worked and you could say it didn’t. Both perspectives are true. How frustrating, right? What do you do when the evidence from your very successful life is also telling you it’s time to try a different kind of life?
I guess I’m saying that I hope Russ can find grace in the possibilities of teamwork and friendship. That’d be the simplest way of putting it. In Moby Dick, Herman Melville wrote beautifully about friendship, reminding us “how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them.” That’s about having the capacity to be surprised by what feels good when you acquiesce to a little bit of shared community. Out here on our own, failure upon failure, it’s possible, at least, to gather the information. To take a deep breath and try something else.