Russell Westbrook is about as chaotic as basketball players come, and there’s something to be said for chaos in small doses. The Los Angeles Clippers of last season were slow, mechanical and largely orderly. James Harden pretty famously sticks to a small number of shots. Kawhi Leonard has his spots as well. Most of the time, at least during their heyday of December and January, their talent was so overwhelming that the somewhat predictable nature of their offense was still more than enough to win.
When it wasn’t? Westbrook could still steal stretches and by extension games through sheer energy. When you’ve spent an entire game methodically defending a small number of predictable actions, seeing Westbrook fly out of the corner to steal an offensive rebound midair becomes sort of a shock to the system. It’s really hard to defend at Harden’s speed and Westbrook’s speed at the same time. In sufficiently limited quantities, that chaos is a pretty dangerous weapon.
But it’s also, well, chaos, and it’s pretty hard to rely on chaos. During that dominant stretch in December and January, the Clippers were around seven points better per 100 possessions without Westbrook in the game. He had to be benched to accommodate Harden’s arrival, and he shot 26% from the floor in a six-game first-round loss to the Dallas Mavericks. Inject chaos at the right moment and it becomes adrenaline. Do it every night and it can just as easily become poison.
And make no mistake, the Nuggets need Westbrook to be an every night player once he inevitably clears waivers and signs with them. They aren’t the Clippers. This isn’t a 12-deep roster burnished with limitless shot-creation. Nikola Jokic is the best generator of team offense in basketball. Jamal Murray is a worthy sidekick. After that? Well, as we saw in Game 7 against the Minnesota Timberwolves, when the non-Jokic/Murray Nuggets scored 21 total points, it’s pretty shaky.
Denver isn’t going to ask Westbrook to start, or at least shouldn’t. When Michael Malone was asked about Denver’s needs before the Westbrook addition, he said “somebody to play behind Jamal Murray.” If that means 10 or 15 minutes per night when Murray sits, this could potentially work. Who cares if the Westbrook chaos poisons Denver’s bench units when they’ve already been dead for years? Might as well see if his energy can give the reserve groups a bit of a spark.
Westbrook’s annual relocation comes with inevitable questions about his willingness to adapt his game. He’s made tweaks here and there. His on-ball defensive effort for the Clippers was largely quite good, at least, and he’s trimmed his mid-range volume to almost acceptable levels. He still doesn’t make anywhere near enough 3s, but most of them come in the corner at least. He still doesn’t do enough moving off of the ball, but nobody incentives that quite like Jokic.
If Denver plans to stagger him and Murray, there are a bunch of fun ways Westbrook and Jokic can work together. There might not be two players in the NBA who play at more different speeds. They can run pick-and-roll in either direction, and when it inverts with Westbrook as the screener, there are going to be lobs and short-roll setups available aplenty. Remember the time Dwyane Wade threw a full-court alley-oop to LeBron James in Miami? Jokic-to-Westbrook is probably the NBA’s best chance of replicating that.
The stakes here are pretty low. Reggie Jackson has been bad in consecutive postseasons. Westbrook is a more volatile replacement. Denver is going to lose games because of Westbrook’s aggressiveness. It is going to win games because of it as well, and remember, Murray tends to miss regular-season games. It might not be the worst thing to have a backup who can scale into starter minutes pretty easily available. Westbrook is going to have games in January and February where he posts 20-point triple-doubles that are followed by 24-hour discourses about what a bucket he is and how much the league disrespected him. He can still do that on the occasional night. It’s all of the other ones that cause problems, but, hey, he’s making the minimum.
At best, he eats Jackson’s regular-season innings and maybe even replaces some of what was lost when Bruce Brown left. At worst, well, again, he’s making the minimum. Trade him or cut him. Minimum-salary players flop all of the time. Westbrook no longer carries the stature to divide a locker room if his role is minimized, especially a championship locker room. It’s on him to adjust to the Nuggets, not the other way around.
If Westbrook hasn’t accepted that by now, then, well, he’s never going to. If any part of him thinks he’s recapturing his former superstar glory, this fails. If he’s prepared to be the best 10-15 minute player he can be, with the chance to occasionally play more on nights Murray rests? This could work. Emphasis on the could, though, because it could pretty easily fail for reasons outside of his control.
At what point do the Nuggets acknowledge what a serious issue their shooting has become? They already took the fewest 3s in the NBA last season, and that was with Kentavious Caldwell-Pope in their starting lineup. The Nuggets had seven players attempt more than two 3-pointers per game last season. Three of them are gone: Caldwell-Pope, Jackson and Justin Holiday. In their place are Dario Saric, who provides a bit of shooting, and Westbrook, probably the worst high-volume 3-point shooter in NBA history. Christian Braun is expected to start in Caldwell-Pope’s place. He’s shot at slightly above a league-average level since reaching the NBA, but at a pretty low volume. Peyton Watson is due a bigger role as well. Thus far, he’s been a bad shooter.
Part of the logic of Westbrook’s theoretical Clippers fit was that they had so much shooting that he could, at times, function like a center off of the ball. Sure, he’s not getting guarded on the perimeter, but you can stick him in the dunker’s spot (that’s where Aaron Gordon lives), weaponize him as a cutter (always a dubious proposition where Westbrook is concerned) and just generally find ways to work around those spacing woes when there’s shooting coming from everywhere else. Denver can’t exactly do that. At the very least it’s hard to imagine him ever coexisting in lineups with Gordon unless he’s playing on the ball in every possession.
What is the peak spacing unit that maximizes Westbrook’s individual creation off of the bench? Maybe he plays in lineups with Saric at center and Michael Porter Jr. at power forward? Such groups leave a lot to be desired defensively, and if possible, you’d probably like to find ways to pair Westbrook with Watson if only for the lob possibilities. Maybe those four with Julian Strawther could survive? Strawther, notably, has probably been the best shooter at Summer League. He took 22 3s in two games and made nearly 41% of them. A lot of Denver’s hopes for the 2025 championship rest on Strawther being an elite shooter right now. He’s played 545 NBA minutes to date, so that’s a tall order.
The best version of the Nuggets probably involves some sort of trade built around Zeke Nnaji’s contract and their 2031 first-round pick for another more malleable veteran. Such a move would be extremely out of character for Calvin Booth. His sustainability plan for these Nuggets relies on young players Malone didn’t want to use last season. Now Malone has no choice. Giving up a pick for a veteran gives the old-school Malone another excuse not to trust the youngsters.
Those youngsters are going to be the backbone of Denver’s bench. Westbrook’s job will, in part, be to help maximize them. It’s going to be an adjustment for them. Teams tend to prefer not developing their players under chaotic circumstances, but Westbrook is chaos incarnate. The Nuggets are betting that they can harness it before it swallows them whole.
