Nuggets' Russell Westbrook finally found his house after the Oklahoma City, just in time to save his legacy

Russell Westbrook had some selected words for his former team when he returned to the Denver Nuggets changing room after his victory 7 on Saturday. “The wrong person chose her, right?” According to reports, he asked rhetorically when he removed the Los Angeles Clippers.

Although an answer appears most likely, it is not entirely clear who it relates. The obvious answer is James Harden, with which Westbrook played in three separate teams. The Clippers exchanged against him last season and he escaped Westbrook as the starting point of the team. Harden scored only seven points in game 7.

Westbrook could also have referred to Kris Dunn, which the Clippers exchanged against Westbrook last summer. The Nuggets often played in defense of Dunn because they did not fear his 3-point shootout.

Perhaps he referred to coach Ty Lue when the Clippers Westbrook often selected as a nugget that they would not protect from Deep. Westbrook punished them with 42% from the 3-point range of the series.

In the end, it doesn't matter, because the truth of the past few years is that Westbrook would have understandable handles with well more than three people. The second half of his career in Hall of Fame was basically a mess.

When he reunited himself with hardness in Houston, it was so badly offensive that the rockets had to give up the position of the center entirely to try to get them running. He was swept out of the first round in Washington as No. 8. The Lakers are only now recovering from their catastrophic decision to act against him in 2022. The Clippers, well, Westbrook, said it itself, didn't it?

Westbrook is an MVP, the first player since Oscar Robertson, who has an average of a triple double double. But legacies for non-champions are cruel. Harden, an independent MVP, is certainly reminded that he is his terrible game 7.

Westbrook's fights to adapt to a new team defined his entire career after Thunder and until recently seemed to clarify an otherwise historical heritage. If Harden's career could be distilled in a handful of terrible elimination games, which hope had Westbrook then to escape the very ugly, very messy end of his career?

Probably not much, especially since he had his appropriate share of guilt for it. He spent years to push back against the necessary changes in his game. He was always able to summon a big defense for big games or in the right matchups, but his efforts for the base of the possession left something to be desired. He always turned the ball too much and took too many mid-range jumpers. He did not change the corner 3 until he became a clipper, and he only started making it consistent this season.

In fact, it would be easy to attribute Westbrook's success as a nugget of this specific recording. He made seven big ones in the Clipper series, including the one who sent game 1 into the extension. He led the nuggets by beating 45 of them this season. This is almost twice as high as his sum every season, which he had since left the thunder (his previous high was 23 in this period), and this has a major contribution to describing his failure with these other team. When Westbrook left the thunder, he had to play more from the ball. He never felt comfortable as a shooter or as basically something else.

Until he arrived in Denver.

Whether the adjustments he had made to the brilliance of Nikola Jokić, the pressure from years of disappointment elsewhere or only good old -fashioned growth, whereby Westbrook had made the subtle improvements that were necessary in order to be able to thrive as role players. This season he scored 126 points as a cutter when he had crossed the first time since 2012, even though he did not in injuries, pandemic or lockout-shorted season. He recorded the second highest offensive backstream rate of his career after the Thunder. Finally he became the off-ball player that his teams needed him.

Some of these changes started with the Clipper. At that time he started again, and when he turned a few of his bad mid-range jumpers into corner 3s. But part of what the partnership in Denver made that the nuggets never tried to bury Westbrook's old ego – they only tried to get it to accept new things. The Clippers could never really enable Westbrook to play its typical, chaotic basketball mark in a team, with Harden and Kawhi Leonard beat the stone and absorb the possession and the clock.

But the nuggets urgently needed an injection of the chaos. Her bank was partly a chaos throughout the Jokić era because no backup can reproduce its unique playing style. Westbrook obviously doesn't do it, but he needs the need to bring his own identity to the ground. Yes, that often means sales and sloppy crimes, but the nuggets skilfully realized that they lost games on the bench anyway. Westbrook may lose some, but the Hochvarianzstraße in which he plays would win as many.

He admitted that even after game 7.

“I think it is my ability to be a nature of nature on the ground, so it looks. It can be a sales, it can be a missed shot, it can be a theft, it can be a dark, it can be a missed three, it can be a creator. “It could be everything, so just take it as it comes and whatever happens, you go with it.”

This energy, even if it could go into the nuggets as easily as well, has become a real capital for Denver.

And Jokić learned to hug it on his better nights. When Bad Westbrook proved to be problematic, the nuggets simply took it out. When the good version buzzed from him, the nuggets leaned forward. They let him run his two-man game in critical moments with Jokić and remain more involved in the game than he ever could as hardship or LeBron James. Perhaps the most integrative teammate of the NBA needed, but Denver finally found the right balance between the player Westbrook and what everyone wanted to become.

That's why they are driving ahead. Westbrook had its share of shaky moments in the entire series, but the good predominates the bad. The clipper would not have beaten the nuggets without him.

If you need proof of this, you will not seek more than one of his ex-teams, the Lakers who have just lost a playoff series in which JJ Redick used the same five-man line-up for the entire second half of a game. Denver has spent the same thing in recent years. You cannot win five players in the off -season. Westbrook gave them a sixth and he gave them for almost nothing.

This is an important distinction here. Westbrook's weaknesses were unsustainable in a Max contract. The rewards predominate the risks of a minimum and it probably never does more than that. He is now in a different phase of his career, at the age of 36 and firmly in a reserve. He saw how bad things can go in the wrong team. Why ever leave the right one?

Hopefully he doesn't. Westbrook's series and season with the nuggets should call up the history of this part of his career. He will never completely disguise the bad moments of the good, but before it became a nugget, there was simply not nearly enough good to keep his reputation for the prime.

If his career had ended a year or two ago, the permanent memory of a greater area of ​​all time was how sad everything ended. He is certainly aware of this. He heard the “West Brick”. He certainly knows what the clipper thought about him because he said just as much after the game. Right or wrong, their feelings matched the greater consensus.

This Nugget's stint therefore serves as an important memory of what it can be if things go right. He is Mercurial, he is inconsistent and he has meaningful weaknesses, but he has always been much more proposed than these last years.

In Denver he had the chance to remind the basketball world of it, and in this series he ran with it.