Few games have ever captured the late-career Russell Westbrook experience quite like Denver’s 144-139 win over the Brooklyn Nets on Tuesday.
There were a few scattered moments that reminded you why he’s playing for his sixth team in seven years. There was an ugly turnover in the fourth quarter that came about after he challenged Ziaire Williams and got tunnel vision following some trash talk. He even missed a wide-open dunk.
But unlike so many of these viral missteps, this one came in a game in which Westbrook thrived. In 21 minutes, he racked up 22 points and five assists. That ugly turnover against Williams was the only one he committed all night. His defensive effort was relentless. The force with which he threw this ball was entirely necessary to generate the turnover, but there was something so delightfully Westbrook-ian about the sequence. It wasn’t enough to just get the ball off of Dorian Finney-Smith. He had to chuck it so hard it flew off-screen.
The steal felt somewhat emblematic. This is why the Nuggets brought Westbrook to Denver. Yes, they very clearly needed bench offense. They got only four 20-point games out of reserves all of last season. But they also needed this energy, a reserve who could lift an otherwise lifeless bench group that so frequently loses games for Denver’s stellar starters.
Denver lost the Westbrook minutes by 38 total points in their first three games. They played Brooklyn evenly with him on the floor Tuesday. That’s enough for Nikola Jokic to handle the rest.
Finding that energy is a tricky thing. Westbrook at his worst can just as easily sap it out of those lineups with questionable shot selection, missed layups leading to transition buckets going the other way and frustration fouls. Those have been frequent features of Westbrook’s early Denver run.
But Tuesday was a return to basics for him. The jumpers weren’t gone entirely, but they were minimized. He took only four of them, and made three. Everything else came near the basket, and he notably got to the free-throw line 10 times. That’s as many attempts as he had in his first three games combined. The best version of Westbrook is the one that barrels toward the basket with reckless abandon, and it’s the one likeliest to bring energy to those otherwise joyless reserve units.
Denver doesn’t beat Brooklyn without Westbrook on Tuesday. The Nuggets almost always lose games because of reserves, not win them, and even if Westbrook’s median is closer to the first three games than the fourth, there’s something to be said for having a player stashed on your roster that can create such wild variance.
For a lot of teams, having a player struggle to the degree that he has early on three quarters of the time would be untenable. For Denver, the bench has been so bad for so long that the hope of the remaining 25% swinging games was worth a low-cost gamble. On Tuesday, at least, that gamble paid off. Only time will tell if does in the long run.
