Exits: To be lifted
Bradley Beal led, Russell Westbrook adapted, this Wizards season doesn't have to be a one-off.
Sometimes a sense of calm resignation is all you want from Russell Westbrook. That and lapidary outside shooting. The Wizards Game 5 against Philadelphia had both.
Selfishly, all I wanted this season was an appreciative landing place for Russ. A team where he could settle, find an auspicious shield from the derision that’s dogged him since he left Oklahoma. Houston had seemed a fair bet at first. Paired with James Harden again and the permission to shoot from wherever, whenever, and maybe Harden moving back to the kind of close-up basketball that made him such a bullying fixture before he got agoraphobic for anything but the wide open space of half-court. Of course, that never happened. Westbrook was chained to the Rockets metrics, made to play surreptitiously off ball if at all. Whether the partnership soured because Harden had, in his mind, already left Texas, or whether it chafed in forcing a fit, Westbrook stayed the outlier and the weight of his salary made it so much worse. The feeling was that whatever team took him in, they had better be prepared to lift from the knees rather than brace for a boost, a twisting zephyr, a gust that might blow them off course but would mean well, and wouldn’t you love to land anywhere Westbrook had the wherewithal to launch you?
I digress, because bound up in the desire to see Westbrook settled and vindicated is the deceptive weight of nostalgia. All the ways we rewrite his career, his performances, even his path forward, on the outcomes we never got. On what we assumed he was always trying to work his way back to — a core like OKC’s in 2011, a title as deserved as that would’ve been.
But a funny thing happened while we were using markers of the past to measure Westbrook’s first season in Washington: he adapted.
Paired with Bradly Beal, so determined to double-down on his commitment to the Wizards after John Wall was traded and speculation ran rampant on where it meant Beal might end up, Westbrook bought in. He recorded the highest rebound and assist averages per game of his career this season, an achievement easy to glance over for how we’ve grown accustomed to Westbrook living comfortably in, if not cannibalizing, those columns.
But to jump from seven assists per game last year with the Rockets, to eleven alongside Beal and what was probably initially a wary group, signalled a deeper sort of settling in than a guy going through the motions. There was trust there.
“He just has a knack for the ball in terms of rebounding,” Beal said of Westbrook in mid-April, “He pushes the ball. He loves [passing]. He’s unselfish. He wants his guys to be involved in the game. Obviously, they lead to assists.”
Westbrook’s passes are complimentary in that they feel destined for the guy with his hands out to catch them. Part of it is point guard intuition but most of it is Westbrook making them believe it.
For Robin Lopez, it’s a lob caught high and diverted for a hook shot, for Rui Hachimura, it’s less the specific play than a two-handed, bursting kick levelled from the chest that holds enough intention, enough excess velocity, that Hachimura will often jolt upon receiving it into a bunny hop shot from the corner, or lift to dunk from standing and swarmed under the net (and then incidentally there will be Russ, roaring happily right in his face once Rui’s made whatever it is he was trying for). For Alex Len or Davis Bertans, it’s an overhanded floater out to the side or backwards as Westbrook, baiting, eurosteps through the paint. With Daniel Gafford, it’s a one-handed, easy arcing underhand that Gafford can stuff on his way down. And for Beal, it’s been, more than anything, nods of appreciation — near-tender handovers, like baton passing, where Westbrook will stop knowing his leg is done and hang back, so he has a good spot to watch Beal work from.
It’s Westbrook’s passing that kept the Wizards from getting swept. Volleys turned into a vital and revitalizing way of him saying I see you when his teammates seemed to need it most, movement that pushed the pace and shifted the game in necessary stretches to intuitive over reactionary. It’s Westbrook’s passing that was the vehicle for his own back-shifting into figuring out the kind of teammate everybody needed him to be this season, on this team.
That the Wizards ended up 8th should be its own reassuring feat. Something they might still view as a one-off until they get a better sense from Tommy Sheppard what direction the team is going to take. If the franchise opts to keep Beal and Westbrook, and has Lopez and Len, plus Raul Neto expiring this summer, there’s a significant portion of space to fill at a discount given the last two years of Westbrook’s salary on the books. If the Wizards keep only Beal, even if they jettison everybody, it only means the horizon they’ve been moving toward stands to get that much farther away.
In his final postgame after the Wizard’s Game 5 loss, Beal said, in phrasing and sentiment that was markedly past-tense, “Having Russ here was incredible. I’ve done nothing but cherish his presence since the moment he got here.”
There’s a sense there that Beal shouldn’t speak to a future with Westbrook, who he’s said “lifts him up”, shouldn’t want for it. But Beal is going into his 10th season and Westbrook has shown what good a little motion, some ancillary movement, can do.
However you feel about him, Russ is irreplaceable. There is no one in the league right now able to lob the little pockets of destiny he does, or more straightforwardly, make for a replacement with the kind of star calibre Beal requires next to him not just to stay, but to win. To be lifted.