Russell Westbrook is done. The nine-time All-Star and 2017 MVP announced his retirement on Tuesday after 18 NBA seasons, ending a career that will be debated as long as basketball is played.
Westbrook leaves the game with the most triple-doubles in NBA history at 201. He averaged a triple-double for an entire season four different times. He scored 25,932 career points. He was the face of the Oklahoma City Thunder for a decade, then bounced through Houston, Washington, the Lakers, the Clippers, Denver, and Sacramento, playing every stop like it was Game 7.
He never won a championship. He never made a Finals after Kevin Durant left OKC in 2016. His shot never got better. Every one of those things will be brought up in the next 72 hours as talking heads argue about where Westbrook ranks all time.
Draymond Green already made his position clear. He blasted NBA fans on Wednesday for spending Westbrook’s retirement day tearing down his career instead of celebrating it. Green pointed out that Westbrook is a first-ballot Hall of Famer, one of the most physically dominant guards in NBA history, and someone who reshaped what a point guard could be in the modern game.
Green is right. The Westbrook-Harden-Durant Thunder teams changed how the league was built. The 2017 season, when Westbrook posted 42 triple-doubles and won MVP on a team no one thought would make the playoffs, is one of the great individual seasons ever. His fashion, his pregame energy, his willingness to play at a level of intensity that made you tired just watching him. All of that mattered.
The criticism is also fair on its own terms. Westbrook shot 44 percent from the field for his career and 30 percent from three. He turned the ball over more than any player in his era. His shot selection in the playoffs was often brutal. Teams that acquired him at the tail end of his career, particularly the Lakers, struggled to fit him.
You can hold both things at once. Westbrook was a top-40 player of all time who never quite figured out how to fit into what winning basketball looked like in the second half of his career. Those are compatible ideas. Everyone should be able to say them out loud without it becoming a shouting match.
He goes into Springfield in five years. His jersey will get raised in Oklahoma City. He will get every honor the sport gives its all-time greats. He deserves all of it.
He will also spend the rest of his life answering questions about why he never got a ring, why the shot never came around, and whether he could have been more accommodating late in his career. Those are legitimate questions. He knows they are coming.
Westbrook does not owe anyone an apology for playing basketball as hard as any guard ever did. Enjoy his career. Argue about it. That is what he wanted.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
