Russell Westbrook Was Singular

When the Seattle SuperSonics drafted Russell Westbrook fourth overall in 2008, around six weeks before they officially became the Oklahoma City Thunder, the league had no idea what to do with such an athletic and violent point guard. Westbrook, who announced his retirement this week, leaves behind a very different NBA than the one he joined 18 years ago, but, despite the considerable passage of time, the extent to which the game changed, and the extensive accolades he racked up, he never became a player who made sense. No sane coach would ever have instructed any of their charges to play more like Russell Westbrook, less because of the riskiness inherent to such a tactic, and more because of its plain impossibility. Westbrook was singular.

Consider the NBA that Westbrook joined. It was ass. By 2008 the group of bigs—Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, Dirk Nowitzki, and others—that dominated the decade to that point had begun their decline. Despite obviously being the best player in the league, LeBron James was ruled unworthy of being named MVP by a newspaper-dominated national media class that relished preserving the legacy of Michael Jordan. So, at the end of the 2007–08 season, the voters gave the award to Jordan cosplayer Kobe Bryant, to congratulate him for being lucky enough to have Pau Gasol on his team. David West and Caron Butler were all-stars. Steve Nash, Chris Paul, and, to a far lesser aesthetic extent, Deron Williams were carrying forth the point guard position, which was in a pretty dire state.

Not for long, it turned out. The first bit of Westbrook’s career came alongside the immediate success of Derrick Rose, taken at the top of the same draft, which became the natural and obvious way to make sense of it. Both were among the best athletes in the league the second they joined it, promising to remake the point guard position, before that primarily thought of as the domain of tricky little craftsmen and heady floor generals, into something crazier. Move over, Jose Calderon, we got guys who can dunk now.