The Oklahoma City Thunder lost Kevin Durant before the 2016-17 season. He was replaced in the team’s starting lineup with Victor Oladipo. The team also moved Serge Ibaka and replaced him in the lineup with Domantas Sabonis (who despite having a somewhat high ceiling averaged 5.9 points per game during the regular season and played six more minutes in the team’s 4-1 loss to the Rockets than I did) and, eventually, Taj Gibson.
Somehow, that team won 47 games and made the playoffs as a 6-seed.
Think about that for one second. The Thunder replaced arguably the second-best basketball player alive and a three-time first-team All-Defense selection with a somewhat inefficient scorer, a rookie who didn’t see the floor in the postseason, and a veteran whose best days are behind him. They still were one of the 10 best teams in the league.
This is a direct testament to Russell Westbrook. Obviously basketball is a team game and success is a collective effort of a combination of five players on a court at any given time, but no player has ever had his fingerprints on as many things as Westbrook did in 2016-17.
It’s the best and worst thing about Westbrook. He finds a way to impact the game all over the floor, and more often than not, it turns out well. However, this isn’t always a good thing – he isn’t an especially good shooter, turns the ball over a lot, shoots his team out of games, all that stuff you’ve heard and read about since Westbrook came into the league.
Watching Westbrook play basketball this season was like watching a high-risk, high-reward potential disaster unfold. You knew something was going to happen, you just had no idea whether that something was going to be good or bad. You also knew that the only two potential outcomes were good and bad, there was no middle ground in which Westbrook is capable of operating.
By now, you’ve heard all the stats. The Thunder were really good when he had a triple-double and really bad when he didn’t. Oh also he averaged a triple-double over the course of the season, but he was a ball hog who may or may not have seemed like he was chasing a season-long triple-double, so maybe there is an asterisk next to this but maybe not.
But when you hear that argument, it makes you ponder what else Westbrook should have done. The biggest flaw the Thunder had all year was also their greatest asset: Westbrook is the entire team. Their rise was attributed to Russell Westbrook. You can just as easily argue that their fall was tied to him.
Well, at the very least, we can identify that the Thunder lost in the first round to the Rockets because he wasn’t able to play 48 minutes a game. You’ve certainly seen these tweets flying around over the last 12 hours or so.
Thunder outscored the Rockets in the series by 4.9 points per 100 possessions w Westbrook on the floor. They were a -51.3 per 100 w him off.
— Fred Katz (@FredKatz) April 26, 2017
Harden plays in a system. Westbrook is the system. That's probably gonna have to change for OKC. https://t.co/GuXe6UMuxr
— Ramona Shelburne (@ramonashelburne) April 26, 2017
Again, this was the charm and the ultimate downfall of Westbrook. No player in NBA history was used more over the course of a season than he was, as his usage rate of 41.7 percent was an all-time record. As someone pointed out, he had a higher usage rate in five playoff games against the Rockets than Michael Jordan did in Space Jam, which is a silly comparison but illustrates his importance to his team kinda perfectly.
But for one second, let’s ignore all of this. Let’s ignore Westbrook’s flaws, the Thunder’s flaws, how their season ended, the fact that Durant left, all that stuff.
Instead, let’s just focus on the singular truth of Russell Westbrook and the 2016-17 Oklahoma City Thunder: They were fun as hell. The team was constructed around one guy being allowed to do whatever he wants. On paper, this is bad. In practice, it was thrilling. The team and its fan base spent all year with a gigantic chip on their collective shoulders due to the loss of Durant, and it came through in how the team played and how the fans were so invested in every single thing that happened.
Yes, the team was too dependent on one player. It’s impossible to discuss the Thunder without acknowledging that. That doesn’t make them any less fun. If anything, it makes it easier to enjoy Oklahoma City, especially on those nights where you can tell Westbrook just had that little something extra and was going to will the team to a win. Every Thunder player played a little better in those games. The crowd at Chesapeake Energy Arena got a little louder and a little more into the game – which, for the famously energetic Thunder fans, says a lot – which acted as fuel the entire team, especially Westbrook, who feeds off of crowd noise like an All-American college linebacker playing in front of his student section.
Oklahoma City’s next step is kind of obvious. It needs to figure out what to do its roster from 2-15 so that it doesn’t struggle so much when Westbrook has to rest, because he is human despite the fact that he plays basketball like a cyborg.
If doing this means that Westbrook won’t have to be as much of a polarizing, ball-dominant force of nature, that’s fine. We’ll always have this year.
