Top 50 NBA players from last 50 years: Russell Westbrook ranks No. 35
Editor's Note: As part of a new series for his podcast, "What’s Wright with Nick Wright," FOX Sports commentator Nick Wright is ranking the 50 best NBA players of the last 50 years. The countdown continues today with player No. 35, Russell Westbrook.
Russell Westbrook’s career highlights
- Nine-time All-Star
- Two-time first-team All-NBA, five-time second team, two-time third team
- 2017 MVP
- 2009 All-Rookie team
- Two-time scoring champion
- Three-time assist champion
- Four seasons averaging a triple-double
- Most career triple-doubles
The numbers for Russell Westbrook are staggering. All of them.
From the scoring, rebounding and assists to the turnovers, shooting and usage rates. There’s a rebuttal for every Westbrook stance, with any one point made about him both defensible and deficient and leaving him in a constant state of being both underrated and overrated.
"(Westbrook) is a player some people would swear has to be in the top 20," Wright said. "And some people will swear has to be outside of the top 100."
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Russ averaged a triple-double in three straight seasons and has 194 regular-season triple-doubles for his career.
Stark contrasts in his productivity and efficiency, and from the regular season to the postseason, only further the gap between subjectivity and objectivity for the player referred to — sometimes derisively — as Mr. Triple-Double. Nobody has packed more athleticism into a 6-foot-3 frame. Even more than a decade later, his physical exploits remain a marvel. But the relentless effort he exhibits with the ball in his hands – by far his greatest strength – has often been undermined by his lethargy on defense.
So, while few players in the history of the NBA have brought more to the table than Westbrook, perhaps no superstar has simultaneously taken more off it.
It wasn’t always this way with Russ, whose pairing with Kevin Durant turned the Thunder almost instantly into a contender. Before either turned 24, and with a 22-year-old James Harden coming off the bench, Oklahoma City vanquished Dirk Nowitzki’s Mavericks, Kobe Bryant’s Lakers and a Hall of Fame quartet in San Antonio before falling to the superteam Heat in the 2012 Finals.
The contradictions of Westbrook's career didn’t really manifest until 2014. As he fought through a knee injury that sidelined him for about half the season, KD entered his apex and was voted MVP while the Thunder won 59 games. OKC wouldn’t have come within two wins of the Finals without Russ, however, whose sustained excellence in the playoffs helped the club rally from series deficits in the first two rounds and challenge the eventual-champion Spurs much more than the Heat did.
In 2015, Durant missed more than half the season and Westbrook won the scoring title while having what was at that point his best year — and the Thunder missed the playoffs. In 2016, Westbrook made first-team All-NBA for the first time and put together the best five-week stretch he’s ever had in the playoffs.
"It’s unfair and disingenuous to act like Russ never had good playoff moments," Wright said. "Up until Game 5 of the Western Conference finals, he was actually a very valuable playoff performer."
His dominance alongside Durant propelled Oklahoma City to a 3-1 lead over the 73-win Warriors, and just one win away from their second Finals appearance. And then Russ unraveled. He shot 36.8% from the field, 26.3% from 3 and 73.9% on free throws while averaging five turnovers over the next three games.
The Thunder lost all of them, and Durant departed in free agency a few weeks later. Westbrook would never be the same, reaching historic heights in the regular season but never competing for a title again. In 2017, he became the first player in 55 years to average a triple-double for an entire season, earning him a controversial MVP selection and a first-round exit in the playoffs.
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Skip Bayless details Russell Westbrook’s career from his UCLA Bruins days, to the Oklahoma City Thunder, to the Washington Wizards and now the Los Angeles Lakers.
The next two seasons played out in the same fashion, with Westbrook averaging triple-doubles and OKC getting bounced in the opening round. He’s logged 157 of his NBA-record 194 triple-doubles since separating from KD. He’s also won just 10 playoff games during that span and been traded three times in the past three years.
"It’s been so bad as of late — this last year with the Lakers was a disaster — people forget how dominant he was at his peak," Wright said. "Flawed but dominant."
Westbrook is the only player in NBA history with multiple scoring and assist titles. He never led the league in rebounds, but he placed in the top 10 four times and twice eclipsed 11 boards per game. Still just 33 years old, he ranks 30th in points and 11th in assists, and he needs less than 900 rebounds to pass Jason Kidd for the most by a guard.
He also has a case as the worst volume shooter in league history.
His 43.8% career mark only looks worse when adjusting for era. Of the 166 players to attempt 2,500 career 3-pointers, Westbrook’s 30.5% conversion rate is the lowest. And after shooting a sterling 82.3% on free throws for the first nine years of his career, he’s made just 69.7% of them over the past five. His postseason line of 25-7-8 is as awesome as his shooting percentages (40.8 overall, 29.6 on 3s) are awful.
Moreover, his current turnover rates in the regular season (4.1) and postseason (4.0) are the highest ever. The only player with a higher usage percentage all time is Michael Jordan.
"Russ’ regular-season accomplishments are up there with the 12, 15 greatest players ever," Wright said. "He was the single hardest player to rank in this entire enterprise."