Russell Westbrick Discussion: Clipper Gonna Clip

I think you're reading too much. It actually shows his maturity. He knows he is the 3rd piece, out of a gigantic contract and he will only stay if we win chips. If we don't, he will be the first to go.

I wasn't impressed with the fit initially, but I think they will be fine. He has a lot of energy in him, he will give 100% all day. I feel the team will bond and have good chemistry, and that is the key when you have this amount of talent.

If it works, it will help extend the tenure of LeBron and that can only be good

 

It's a fair point. The only caveat I would say to that is his team mates generally love playing with him. I haven't seen anything to the contrary. On top of that he has had good success with various top players.

To me he looked absolutely ecstatic being presented his lakers shirt, but I imagine being on 4 teams across 4 years definitely hammers home that the NBA is a business and people only care about what you've done for them recently.

 

Just saw his interview. We need to highlight the Kobe factor here. I remember Kobe mentioning that Westbrook was the guy in the league that best emulated the Mamba Mentality.

Westbrook will have the season of his life playing for Kobe and a championship. He will thrive with it and that competitive mindset will influence others as well.

 

…. and home again in front of family and friends for the LA Lakers.

 

thought his comments were great, actually. seemed to emphasize we over me, seemed comfortable with or without the ball and deferring to lebron as the offensive focal point.

i know folks who were kobe fans will be upset with the "nothing to prove" comment from a ringless player, but i think he's right. he appropriately focused on the fact that he's basically already won life in all the most important ways, and this is just basketball.

i think it took kobe longer to figure out what was important in life, and that was too bad. my guess is he would have won just as much and been happier doing it. i can't tell if mj has even figured it out yet.

 

Thing is LeBron doesn't have time to experiment. He regressed last 2 seasons from what he's always been due to injuries and this year he will still be great but he's no longer young Bron.

I also noted that Russ never said he wanted to be here long term and that the business side would take care of itself. That rings loud without saying much. He proved in Houston that he wouldn't accept a different role and that he would play his way. He was able to continue that in Washington because they didn't have a System/star in place that had to have the ball in his hand so it worked out with Beal.

Russ is a strong minded individual with a great game for sure but will he be able to conform to what we need as a team here is to he seen. Hard to teach an old dog new tricks but he is capable.

Also and lastly, Russ is taking a business approach to this and he isn't giving anything up by coming to LA because of his current deal. It sounds to me like he's gonna want max money again on his next contract so this is gonna be a huge audition for him with the Lakers to prove he can be what they need moving forward obviously. I'm super curious to see if he can bend/compromise if he really wants to be here but I won't be mad if he leaves for more money. You gotta make your nut before you can't.

 

Lebron won a title with Kyrie Irving. Kyrie is far and away the most entitled, selfish, non-team player that I have seen since Adrian Dantley. He actually makes AD look like Tim Duncan. At least AD didn't take weeks off his job because of flat earth conventions, err, I mean personal issues.

So, I see no issues with RW adapting and helping the Lakers win the title. If they have the health, they arent losing.

 

You're overreading.
He actually made sure to note that he came to a championship and is the new guy, he is the one to adapt.
He also mentioned that LeBron has his game and he will be the one that needs to do all the other things.

Russ never had a crew like this. And he is one of the hardest workers in the league who impacts the game in a lot of ways. He will be just fine


If he wants a max and is able to get it, how on earth is that bad for us? No way it is a good deal to give him a max on that age, so let some other team do it and we benefit of 2 years of his prime

 

two things:

1. if anyone was inflexible in houston, it was harden.
2. washington had a star in beal (actually better at basketball than harden, imo)

and ironically, houston worked when they finally moved off of harden-ball offensively (twice, actually, once with paul and once with westbrook).

of course he's not here long-term. he has a huge contract that expires in two years along with lebron's. this whole place might look very different in 2024.

do fans really want players to lie and say "i know i'll only want to be here forever!" all the time? i wouldn't respect this, tbh. he knows the score. he's ready to play now, which is why we got him. who cares about two years from now?

 

Not sure I can agree with this point I’ve spoken about the OKC days of Durant and Westbrook in this thread and how they were a little unlucky not to win a championship. So I don’t think it’s fair to say he needed to change his style of play back then if they were a yearly contender for 5-6 seasons.

Fast forward to his MVP season - he had no help and he did one of the best carry jobs in recent memory.

The following season he gets PG and Melo and the team under performs. Russ was the MVP and it would be strange for the MVP to totally change his style of play. One season later, Russ does sacrifice for the betterment of the team by putting PG into the KD role and he takes on more playmaking and defence. But PG isn’t KD and they get bounced in the first round.

He goes to Houston and for the first third of the season they ask him to shoot 3’s and play the James Harden role when Harden is on the bench. About half way through they realise Russ isn’t a great 3 option and move Capela to play 5 out and Russ and Harden go on a tear. Russ also drastically cuts down his 3pt shooting listening to the coaches and basically goes for mid range or attacking the paint only. He tears his quad before the bubble.

In Washington, he played really well with Beal (who missed time) and they just had a terrible team around them.

So I would argue, Russ plays his style of play, but he does mold to what the team needs. It’s up to us to utilise him properly and put him in positions to succeed. At the end of the day, don’t buy a muscle car and drive it like a Prius.

 

1) I'm referencing only where he said he wasn't gonna change his style of play. In that regard, if he doesn't make the necessary changes as it pertains to this team it could hinder them.

2) I also said that playing with Beal was an easy transition because Beal didn't need the ball in his hands nor has he ever ,he's a true 2.

3) The correlation of not being here long term & not changing his style means he may have the attitude of not changing to best suit the teams needs. He could just say screw it I'm only here for 2 years I'm gonna do me and not buy in. I'm not saying he won't but he hasn't in the past. He's pretty sharp and he's a great player that's totally capable but will he do what is best for the team and not just for Russ? I think he will but i also know his history.

Am I skeptical, yea. Durant wasn't happy with Russ and left. Durant fits into a team pretty easily, look at golden state..Durant didn't leave Golden State because he wasn't happy with Steph, he left because he wanted his own team and didn't like the label of joining a championship team not earning one on his own, that and Draymond lol.

I love Russ, love his energy and relentless drive. Definitely not bashing him. Hopefully he can tune into what the team needs and not say f it I'm gonna do me.

 

Just out of curiosity, you say Russ hasn’t changed his style of play in the past, do you have any examples of this?

Durant didn’t leave because of Russ. He even said from his burner account, all OKC had was him and Russ and he couldn’t win with that. So he left because the team around them just wasn’t built well enough to make it a cake walk for him.

With Durant and WB, OKC were contenders for 6 straight seasons and made the finals once, conference finals three more times (losing to eventual champions each time) and had two season ending injuries to their stars the other 2 years.

Durant left GSW because Green told him they didn’t need him to win, while pundits and the whole of the twitter-sphere said his championships weren’t real while calling him a snake, soft and a front runner. The guy joined a 73 win team and then cried when people didn’t respect his contributions. Now he joined another super team.

 

Durants own words:
"In OKC, I played with a lot of athletes. I didn't play with a lot of skill guys, not like shooters [and] ball-handlers," Durant said while appearing on the "All the Smoke" podcast with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. "So after a while, my game started to grow and I was like, 'I need a change.' This was before the [2015-16] season even started. I was tired of being the only guy who could make threes, make jump shots, and consistently make them."

That's a direct shot at Russ..


I also said that he left GS for the same reasons you listed..


I watch Russ every year, has his game changed to you? Do you have examples of where it did?



Golden State:

“I came in there wanting to be part of a group, wanting to be part of a family, and definitely felt accepted,” Durant told the Wall Street Journal’s J.R. Moehringer. “But I’ll never be one of those guys. I didn’t get drafted there ... Steph Curry, obviously drafted there. Andre Iguodala, won the first Finals, first championship. Klay Thompson, drafted there. Draymond Green, drafted there. And the rest of the guys kind of rehabilitated their careers there. So me? s***, how you going to rehabilitate me? What you going to teach me? How can you alter anything in my basketball life? I got an MVP already. I got scoring titles.”
“As time went on, I started to realize I’m just different from the rest of the guys. It’s not a bad thing. Just my circumstances and how I came up in the league. And on top of that, the media always looked at it like KD and the Warriors. So it’s like nobody could [give] a full acceptance of me there.”​

Durant also cited basketball reasons for his decision to leave the Warriors:

“‘The motion offense we run in Golden State, it only works to a certain point,’ he says. ‘We can totally rely on only our system for maybe the first two rounds. Then the next two rounds we’re going to have to mix in individual play. We’ve got to throw teams off, because they’re smarter in that round of playoffs. So now I had to dive into my bag, deep, to create stuff on my own, off the dribble, isos, pick-and-rolls, more so than let the offense create my points for me.’ He wanted to go to someplace where he’d be free to hone that sort of improvisational game throughout the regular season.”​

 

Well, we talk in a year and see who's right

 

I'm not gonna get too deep into the whole Durant thing as I don't want to derail the Westbrook thread. Durant seems like he has no conviction in what he says as he constantly changes his story, contradicts himself and gets really sensitive when anyone is critical of him. The guy just wanted an easier way to a championship and went to GSW instead of beating them after being up 3-1.

I can give you some examples of how Russell has changed to fit what teammates and coaches asked of him.

The second year of PG & Westbrook in OKC. Russell committed to defence and let PG take the lead on offence. WB's usage dropped to the 30% - the lowest since his second season in the league. He had less FG attempts than PG. He played more off ball to converse energy with 50% of his time at SG (for the 9 seasons prior he spent 90%+ of his time at point). Meanwhile his defensive stats across the board improved to career highs - 1.9 steals, 9.6 defensive rebounds, 0.5 blocks, 5 DWS, 2.4 DBPM and he was 7th in defensive rating in the whole league (the top 10 was made up of all bigs apart from him).

Something similar happened this season with Washington. His usage and FG dropped, letting Beal take the lead while he turned up his defensive contributions - the advanced stats weren't as good because WAS was a rubbish team. Both PG and Beal had excellent offensive seasons with Russ.



Another example; Russ changes his shot selection in Houston. Russ played second fiddle to Harden in Houston. When Harden's on the floor, Russ had low usage when Harden sat, his usage rose - similar to what we will want from him this season.

WB starts the season shooting 30% of his shots from 3 - in line with how Houston wanted to play. And it just doesn't work for him, so in Dec, Houston ask Russell to cut out his 3pt attempts and attack the rim. From that point on, his attempts from 3pt go way down to only 54 attempts - less than 10% of his shot attempts are taken from 3 (the lowest in his career by a far mark). He stops taking any unassisted 3 pt attempts that aren't catch and shoot at all. Instead, he takes over 60% of his shots by attacking the rim with a 60%+ FG percentage there. He also tunes up his mid range and hits them at a 48% rate.

As a result his scoring rises 10 points from 22pts prior to this change to over 32 pts after he cuts the 3's out. Russ hit a career high 47.2% FG percentage, but when looked from December onwards its 52.7% with a 54.2% EFG. Westbrook went on an absolute tear after Capella was traded. Then the pandemic pause happens and Russ tears his quad ramping back up.


EDIT: Westbrook's defence from 2018/2019 and his shot selection from 2019/2020, plus his general motor and triple double ability is MVP level contribution. He's never quite put together a season of both and I'm not sure it's possible from the PG position with how much energy is required. But someone should present it to him and see what happens.

 

it's funny, because i would take most of this as durant being unwilling to change his game and also blaming any failure on "not durant".

 

I like oranges a lot! Does that count?