Russell Westbrook's sad decline has been the talk of summer

By Martin Rogers
FOX Sports Columnist

Right now, who in sports is getting talked about more than Russell Westbrook?

Kevin Durant, maybe, as his trade saga rumbles, and possibly stumbles? Baker Mayfield perhaps, if we’re taking last week in isolation? Nick Kyrgios, for a hot minute, when he was screaming at his box during Wimbledon?

All things considered, Westbrook has been and may continue to be the most consistent giver of sports talk fodder during 2022’s toastiest months, gaining more attention than ever before at a time when his career has never been more turbulent.

His positioning at the center of the NBA’s gossip cycle since the fractured end to a doomed Los Angeles Lakers campaign is a development that doesn’t make much sense on the surface. But when you delve a little deeper, the reasons for it become more clear.

Barely a day goes by without a fresh wrinkle to the Westbrook tale, which leaves us with the strange reality that the league’s most interesting topic of conversation stems from an athlete who might not rate within the top 100 players in basketball.

"The Athletic" placed the 33-year-old Westbrook in the fifth and bottom tier of its annual Top 125 NBA rankings, positioning him with a group of players listed between 85th and 125th in the sport.

His contract is so loaded ($47 million left on the final year) that it might take a pot of multiple first-round draft picks to persuade another team to take it on. What does that say about your perceived value, when it could cost a trove of draft capital usually good enough to land an All-Star … just to get rid of you?

Now, given that this is 2022 and social media doesn’t get any cuddlier, there are plenty of people who find all this quite amusing. If you can’t see the smirks of satisfaction from various sections of the basketball fanbase, then you’re just not looking very hard.

Many league supporters have never had as much of a soft spot for Westbrook as other elite players, and they would argue that there’s a reason for that. He can be spiky at times, and his harshest critics would say he has sometimes seemed more interested in padding his stat line than winning at all costs. In some quarters, there is a genuine sense of enjoyment at his fall from grace.

Yet in truth, this isn’t a funny story. It's a sad one.

Westbrook hasn’t helped his public standing much over the past few months, most pertinently with an exit interview at the end of the season in which he slammed now-fired head coach Frank Vogel and suggested the public support he received from LeBron James and Anthony Davis was phony.

But to see a player considered one of the best 75 of all-time endure such a humiliating set of circumstances is as alarming as it is unfortunate.

"What are you really trying to do to this man?" former NBA Finals MVP Andre Iguodala said, on the "Point Forward" podcast.  "What did he do to y’all?"

It is important to remember this. Westbrook, given every bit of evidence from his career to date, wouldn’t want to be in this position. He wouldn’t choose to have played as disappointingly as he did last season when his link-up with James and Davis fell so woefully flat that Los Angeles finished 11th in the Western Conference.

A nine-time All-Star, Westbrook wouldn’t wish for his contract to be seen as giving perhaps the worst value in pro sports.

The Lakers are keen to get him out the door with his huge salary in tow, as doing so is their only plausible way to get Kyrie Irving into the building. As has been forensically detailed across the hoops media, there isn’t exactly much of a clamor from teams to pick up the phone and roll out the welcome mat.

All the while, each new day brings another little nugget to keep the storyline flowing along. It might be the dog days of summer when nothing of note happens in sports, but no one has told Russ.

Last weekend brought the mystique of a potential lingering beef with James, when both men showed up at a Summer League game but didn’t talk to each other.

New Lakers coach Darvin Ham has spoken positively about being able to use Westbrook productively in his lineup, which no one saw as anything other than a ruse.

Westbrook is Tweeting and chatting — fashion was the latest topic he addressed on Tuesday — but we’re still no nearer to figuring out where he might be playing basketball next season, or if he can do it at a level that offers some viable benefit to a team.

"He is the single most overpaid player in the history of basketball," FS1’s Skip Bayless said, on "Undisputed." "He became the single worst consistent starter in the league. For much of the year, he was the worst on turnovers. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. Going into last year everyone would have assumed he was a first-ballot Hall of Famer."

It is hard to imagine Westbrook being a true superstar-level player again. The way his game is set up works best when everything flows through him, and there simply isn’t a team in the league for whom that is an appealing option.

He still believes in himself, as he should. He’s still part of NBA royalty, even though it doesn’t feel like it right now.

And he’s still a big enough name to get major attention, which is actually the biggest root of the current problem. When you’re a fallen star, everyone is watching closely as the decline gathers speed.

Martin Rogers is a columnist for FOX Sports and the author of the FOX Sports Insider newsletter. You can subscribe to the daily newsletter here.