The Russ-Beverley Shit-Talk Session Got to the Heart of the Westbrook Conundrum

After getting ignobly shuffled out of the playoffs by the Houston Rockets, Russell Westbrook, the NBA's leading MVP candidate and a blatantly ridiculous human being, donned an unseasonable blousy black polka-dotted shirt and an excruciatingly dumb hat, and gave a press conference. One reporter asked about his in-game confrontation with Rockets guard and irritating human being Patrick Beverly. He replied:

"Oh yeah, he was talking about how he was first-team all-defense, but I didn't know what he was talking about because I had 42 at the time in the series. I don't know what he was talking about. Maybe he was dreaming or some shit. I don't know. Sorry, excuse my cuss word. I don't know what he was talking about, but I guess he wanted to be first-team all-defense or something. Maybe he was dreaming about it. I don't know."

This is probably the least sincere apology for cursing I can find in the historical database. Beverly, asked about the incident, peddled a different philosophical perspective:

"That was actually the first time we've exchanged words this postseason, but he's a really good player… He looked up and said, 'No one can guard me. I got 40 points.'

"I'm like, 'That's nice. It took 34 shots to get it.'

"I'm not over here trying to bash anybody. Men lie, women lie, numbers don't. Collectively as a unit, we've done a great job on him, we've tried to make him shoot a lot of tough shots, and the numbers show."

And so, in one pair of post-game shit-talk seshes, we see the whole of Westbrook Studies laid out in front of us. Yes, certainly, he smokes baskets from a fatty blunt and breaks models, but he is not exactly generating efficiency in a way that lines up with The Modern Ideals of Basketball Offense. He is electrifying, but when you're dominating the ball that much,there's no way you're optimizing the talents of, like, the other people on the court.

Of course, he lights up defenders, but his team is deeply mediocre and he can't seem to do it without heaving up thirsty, thirsty three-point heaves that he simply cannot make. Sure, he averaged a triple-double, but he had to wait for Kevin Durant, a player who is better at basketball than he is, to leave town to get the bandwidth to make that happen. Yes, at a time when we are all silently suffering behind cell phones and slowly morphing into a species of goopy same-lookin' techno-blobs, it is refreshing to see an NBA player who pisses into the wind and wears dumb shirts and lives to rattle obnoxious beat reporters. But it kinda blows that he's not in the playoffs anymore, no?

At the end of Tuesday night's game, when Westbrook had five fouls and the Rockets were still only a few possessions ahead, he got defensive matchups on the perimeter—one against Harden, the other against Lou Williams—which he bailed on so aggressively that he theatrically threw his hands up in the air to make sure that he would not be called for a foul. (Lou managed not to score. Harden did.) Westbrook and the Thunder organization have done so much to put him in the middle of everything that happens with this team, and in the logic of that environment, sacrificing open shots at the rim was a perfectly acceptable trade against playing aggressive late-game defense that could result in him fouling out in crunch time. He himself, his continued bodily presence on the court, was literally more important than the structural mathematical reality of a narrowly possessed game where every possession mattered. A lot.

That kind of mindset is, like, clearly not sustainable, right? It will sink the Thunder, or whatever other team Russ plays for if he gets frustrated and leaves. Then again, he did average a triple-double this season, which is genuinely miraculous. This is has been the season-long Westbrook conundrum. Like his fashion choices, Russ is a miracle of what the fuck? moments. His shirts, and this shirt specifically, are stupid, but also a miracle, really. And what kind of world has no space for a stupid shirt? Although maybe if someone got him a pair of regular old dependable jeans to wear, he wouldn't need so many of them.